


Earth's Children of Everywhere

by cRain



Category: Earth's Children - Jean M. Auel
Genre: Drug Use, F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Transgender Characters, Wordcount: Over 100.000, caveman hippies, nature porn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:29:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 25
Words: 62,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28443201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cRain/pseuds/cRain
Summary: The Mother's Wonders manifested themselves a bit differently in Nele, but having eked a peaceful life with her soon-to-be-mate Ronata and a few good friends, she felt as though she could finally find a little place for herself at the Twentieth Cave of the Zelandonii - until the gentle spring day Munavan showed up and announced he was planning a journey.Through fermented fruit drinks, giant sturgeon, sacred birds, steaming pools, First Rites, Love pentagons, bloodstone, flintknapping, crazy horse people, hunting, gathering, carving, pillaging and a great deal of magical mushrooms, eight friends set out to leave their own marks upon the Mother's Great Creation.OR: My Corona-era project where I finished the last Earth's Children book and wanted more, strongly enough that I dedicated the next seven months to a 270 000-word sequel featuring original characters.
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Female Character, Original Female Character/Original Male Character, Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Kudos: 11





	1. Volume 1: A Year on the Road

“Alright, so first thing you’re going to do”, Ronata said, rubbing a wisp of hair out of her face with the back of her wrist, “You’re gonna take your flint, right, and cut right around the parts,”  
“The parts,” said her companion, a mild disgust on her face,  
“You’re gonna make me say it, huh? The ‘manhood’, I guess. And the waste hole. Cut around them. Like this.” She sliced around the anus of the roe deer using an ivory-handled flint knife with a short, straight blade. “You’re going to want to do this carefully, and keep it almost like a whole separate piece.”  
“Killing an animal is not enough,” interjected Nele again, “You have to emasculate him, too?”  
“Listen, don’t be such a frightful rabbit. It’s not my fault you weren’t taught this right as a kid. I thought even acolytes to Zelandoni had to know the basics.”  
Ronata continued to slice gently up the abdomen. “Do this very carefully, because if you jab into the guts, you’ll make a big, gross stink. Especially since I left this dead a bit longer to show you. When an animal rots, the first thing that rots it is the slime inside its own gut. I don’t know if it’s spirits, or what.”  
“It’s probably the same thing that kills people if they get injured in their belly, even if the injury isn’t that bad.”  
“Alright, medicine woman, share your knowledge”,  
Nele put her hands into her lap, contrite but with humour, “Alright, perhaps all I know of medicine is just what I observed from mother. I don’t have an aptitude for it. Nohanam takes up after her, not me.”  
“Well he’s got the woman part down.” Ronata said, forearms growing a sheen of blood.  
“Stop saying things like that. You sound like the man of your hearth.”  
“Anyway. Again, since I left this carcass a little longer so I could show you, I don’t think we should keep the stomach for waterbags. It’s probably starting to rot already. We will leave all the organs in the field and just take the carcass.” She tipped over the animal, abdominal cavity now fully open. The guts fell out of the cavity in a solid chunk, landing in the grass with a wet, sloppy plop.  
“So take that twine, and wrap the forelegs with them. I’ll do the feet. The cave isn’t far.”

A short jaunt up a grassy, sparsely-wooded hill led them to a sheer, rocky section of limestone that hosted a deep depression. This dark hole worn into the cliff was livened by the flickering fires and breeze-billowed hearth curtains that left unmistakable signs of human habitation. They scurried the short, narrow section of stone that led to the cave’s mouth, dodging the odd stretching or drying rack set out in the sun, until they arrived at round section at the far side of the cave where the pounded floor was stained red from repeated use in processing kills.  
Ronata did the bulk of the heavy lifting as the two carried the carcass back to the cave, though Nele’s slender arms did prove useful in balancing the front-heavy deer. As soon as the animal was tossed to the ground, Ronata hurried to a kneeling position.  
“Next step,” she began, preparing to get her clean hands again roughed up by the juices of a carcass, “Peel off the hide. Now this, you are actually good at. I’ve seen you do it.”  
“I have nimble hands!” Nele responds, wiggling her fingers proudly.  
“And I’m brutish and clumsy. Yes. So show me how you skin it. Gently. The more holes you rip, the less useful this’ll be when you try to turn it to leather.”  
Ronata handed her flint blade – this time a very stubby blade with a slight curve – to her partner. Nele cut around the mid-legs and began to pull, gentle scraping away the connective tissue that kept the hide on the body.  
“I’ll get this off in one piece. Actually, it will be such a big and intact piece of leather than we can make a tunic for Munavan,” Nele said with a chuckle.  
“Yeah I think the big guy only wears Megaceros.”  
Just then, a booming voice – more loud than deep – resonated from behind the leather curtain that cut them from the rest of the cave.  
“Who are you calling a big guy?” the voice said, with mock offense.  
Ronata put a hand to her forehead, forgetting briefly of the blood, and leaving a small brown smudge on her temple. “Come in, man.”  
A sturdy, heavy-set man whipped open the curtain and strutted in, planting each step rather heavily. “Is this women’s work, really?” he said, arrogant humour twinkling in his eye.  
“How many times have I told you not to mock me for being a woman? I’m kind of sensitive.” Ronata turned to him, making a scrunched expression in her eyebrows that was oddly masculine on her eternally beardless face.  
“Personally, I like it,” Nele said with a giggle.  
“Of course you do,” Munavan and Ronata replied in staggered unison.  
“This looks like work for a tradesman,” Munavan stated, wobbling to a crouch.  
“Stop, Mune, I’m trying to teach Nele how to actually take care of herself.”  
“Oh, well, that’s more than women’s work. That’s essential work.”  
He backed away slightly. The man’s assertive attitude caused turbulence in his relationship with Ronata, and ever since Nele became such a fixture in his old friend’s life, he’d taken to teasing her, as well. As soon as the hide was fully removed from the deer, Munavan resumed.  
“I came over for reasons other than bothering you.”  
“And yet, no matter what your reasons, you still find a way to bother me,” Ronata chided as she sought something with which to wipe her hands.  
“I have plans. Big plans.”  
Ronata and Nele ruffled a scrap of threadbare rabbit skin to clean their hands, and turned to Munavan, cross-legged and alert with interest.  
“So Luzacam thinks it’s time we make a journey. We are a little old for it, I said, but he says it doesn’t matter since none of us are mated yet, I mean, even you two fools never joined the knot. I’m tempted to say he’s right - once we all get little ones in our hearth it will be years before we can adventure like we can now. So, better late than never, and at least our bones don’t ache with age, yet.” He scooted a stool made of a polished, rounded stump nearer with his foot, and squatted upon it. “Now as you know, Luzacam is a thorn in my side.”  
“As you are in mine. I feel like that defines your friendships, Munavan.” Ronata interjected.  
“Well I guess I have many thorns and many friends. That’s how you learn to act when you work among the boatmakers,” Munavan smirked. “If you were really a man perhaps you’d know this.”  
“I know plenty about being a man, Munavan, and I don’t even need to grow a beard for it.” Ronata made a come-hither gesture with her finger, towards his round, sparsely-haired chin.  
“Ah, you don’t like my beard, do you?”  
“Well, at least it hides your chin.”  
“You say I’m mean, listen to yourself!”  
“Stop it, both of you. I want to hear more about this journey,” Nele said with skeptical interest.  
“If I’m bringing it up with you, you can assume you are invited to join us. Luzacam did happen upon something I’ve really thought of doing for a long time, but didn’t profess it until I had more backers. Joradan and Kosaner aren’t interested, for example. But Luzacam is restless, and I guess I am too. There aren’t many unmated women our age here, and we’ve gotten bored with those who remain. I don’t personally want to mate a fourteen-year barely a year past First Rites.”  
“Leave it to you to need to cross the world to find someone to share pleasures with.”  
“No, no, no. That’s not it. We could meet some women, try foreign cooking, see the sights. We may find the world ends rather nearby to the west, but to the east, well, I have heard it’s bigger than you could imagine.”  
“That sounds amazing.” Ronata said, flatly but sincerely.  
“Luzacam and I were considering leaving straight from the Summer Meeting, which is at the Seventeenth this year, and therefore a bit further north-east, which gives us a start on the path.”  
“That’s where Darandar lives now!” Ronata said, suddenly more enthusiastic.  
“Of course that would entice you. I met a guy from the Losadunai, way back when. He’s around our age, and he told me we could stop with him if we ever traveled that way. I think I’d be ready to take him up on the offer. He was an acolyte, then, and likely still is.”  
Nele made some noises of excitement. Ronata felt her heart soar.  
“We’re at least a moon past the spring even-day. So it will really not be long until we leave for the meeting,” she said.  
“I believe we were considering leaving as soon as the dugout we are building is finished. So when you pack for the meeting, keep in mind it could be a while before you return.” Munavan added. “That is,” he said, as he planted his hands on his knees to rise. “If you’d be interested in joining.”  
“Should I ask my mother?” Ronata said.  
“No,” the other two replied.  
“Ronata, you can count nineteen years old.”  
She scoffed and shrugged in consideration. “I suppose I’ll ask forgiveness, not permission.”  
The women grinned at each other. Ronata’s smile faded. “We are finishing with this deer before we even consider thinking of the journey, understand?” Nele nodded. “But maybe later we can take a break and I’ll show you how to make the sweetened traveling cakes. They’re a bit more complicated than the meat-and-fat ones you see more often, but they don’t taste like leather, so that makes the effort worthwhile.” 

Nele had her belongings in disarray on her bedroll. She had never been the best at packing for journeys or summer meetings, but this year it would be a lot more complicated. At least for yearly summer meetings one would not need to consider such a vast array of weather conditions, or the idea of planning perhaps a whole year in advance.  
The tall, slender woman sat on the floor, back facing the bedroll. She’d given up on packing for the moment, and instead sought to complete another woven, decorative sash before her departure in a few short days. Nele often found herself teased for her competence in more laborious tasks like hunting, especially in her childhood when she was often compared to masculine standards. But she couldn’t meet the standards of feminine labour, either, in some ways: she was quite clumsy at cooking, and usually gave up on any task more complex than frying cakes of pounded grains on hot rocks, or occasionally crumbling dried meat into a broth. Her tongue knew good seasoning, but her conscious mind did not.  
Nele had one talent, though, which provided a means for trade and left her feeling less of a burden: she had very steady hands, and could work with finesse in most tasks requiring finger dexterity. She could pierce ivory beads without scraping them; she could thread thongs through awl-poked holes on her first try; she could weave fine decorative sashes, and she was quite decent at basket-making. While she would sometimes take mock offense to the accusation that Ronata was her “man”, deep down she appreciated the insinuation. It made her feel quite feminine and demure to sit at home weaving sashes when she knew her future mate could be dragging home a kill with a company of mostly men.  
Nele steadily braided her current handiwork. It was long enough to make a decent belt. The yellowed fibers of dried cattail twisted together and alternated with the deep, reddish undercoat of a woolly rhinoceros created a stark contrast. Separated horizontally by about the width of two fingers, she would weave in a cockle shell, in alternation with the tiny, pointed teeth of a fox. She wasn’t sure if she would keep this piece. It looked nice, but the variety of material in the workmanship – rhino hair from the north, shells from the western seas, cattails from the marshy areas to the south – showed that the item was of great value, and it could be traded in preparation for the trip. Or maybe, she thought, she could carry it with her throughout the trip, along with a few other things she’d made. They were lightweight and compact, and had a visual appeal that could make them more readily tradeable than their core elements like teeth and fibers, which were less luxury goods and more base materials that everyone traded. She also didn’t like the idea of walking for moons with a bag full of shells and teeth; they’d probably wind up crushed or lost. Not to mention, she chuckled to herself, having a heavy bag of the hard, little objects could make her jingle with each step like a dancer. Three days of that background noise, and Munavan would surely wring her neck like a felled ptarmigan.  
She had just tied some terminal knots in the end of her weaving when the curtain to her dwelling flew open. She turned her head, back still facing the outer wall.  
“Check it out,” Ronata said, producing a sack of white, fine fat. “I just rendered this tallow outside. Gave my first batch to Mune for a lubricant, because it smelled gross. I don’t know what went wrong. But anyway, I think we should take this and make a batch of traveling cakes, but maybe we should wait until we get to the Seventeenth to do that. What have you been up to?”  
Nele whipped her completed belt over her shoulder. “Looks great,” Ronata said laconically. She was not well versed in complimenting, but she objectively appreciated the handiwork. Nele looked at her expectantly. Ronata got the message that a few more compliments could be in order. “I could never do that, I don’t know if I have the patience. I am much less of an artist when the end result can’t be eaten.” She crouched down and planted a little kiss on Nele’s high, smooth forehead. “But I see you got distracted from packing. What in the great Mother’s underworld is all this?”  
Nele looked at her bedroll. Somehow, with it being pointed out to her, the overall impact seemed a lot worse. “I don’t know what to pack. We are leaving in about a moon-phase and I want to get ready.”  
“A phase of the moon? You have lost track of time. We are leaving in four days, counting today!” She hobbled over to the sleeping place on her knees. “Alright, winter furs. No. I think we’d be better off making some or trading for some once we reach the Losadunai. By then, it will be the time for leaves to drop. They are too heavy to be worth carrying. Tent, okay, good. You should take the knives you use regularly, but we can make more, especially if we talk to Rand’s friend Kenalal at the meeting,” she observed the stack of decorative sashes and belts Nele had been working on, “are you collecting items to trade? That’s smart thinking. Luzacam has some fine bone and wood carvings he’s been working on, they would make good trade items too,” she thought. Ronata had a penchant for frugality that bordered on stinginess, and while she enjoyed trading missions, it was a bit risky to leave her in charge of the bargaining. “Maybe you would like to paint some of them. That could make them more special. Ask him.”  
“I want to bring my dressy clothes for ceremonies at the meeting, but I should probably leave some of them with mother to hang onto so I don’t need to take them with me,” Nele said, eying a long leather tunic of a soft, darkened skin. It had long, sloping sleeves and decoration of a variety of teeth and ivory elements, a stark contrast to the soft hide of such a rich, dark colour that it was nearly black.  
“Agreed. Traveling clothes? You’ll want a comfy tunic and leggings, not a dress, and perhaps some form breechclout and small shirt if it gets particularly hot. Buckskin is alright, nothing too furry for now.”  
The two continued to sort through materials into the afternoon. After pausing for a dinner of dandelions and herby ptarmigan, they felt content that they were well-packed other than any materials they could not go without for a day, which they’d pack just before departing.


	2. Chapter 2

The Cave set out on an early summer morning where the air was hot but the sky showed wisps of high, grey clouds. As much as beautiful, cloudless weather was a temptation to spend more time outside, clouds were a welcome sight during multi-day travel, to keep the traveler’s skin from puckering with burns at the very beginning. A sunburn on the shoulders was intolerable for the hiker – the backframes in which they carried their belongings had thick, albeit padded straps that sat somewhat heavily on the wearer’s shoulders, and inflamed skin would not allow a pleasant experience. They would avoid walking at high noon, usually taking a very light breakfast while the sun was still low, walking until a bit before mid-day, and taking a long lunch. While lunch was long, it was not always leisurely. Depending on where they’d stopped, many would remove their packs and venture about in search of fruit, plants, and even small game to supplement their traveling food.

Nele, Luzacam, Munavan, and Ronata found themselves mostly separated for the duration of this journey – they were rather intent on making the most of their time with their hearths before taking their leave. There was a bittersweetness when a mother would find their child was interested in a long journey; there were prayers for safe return, and a lifetime of advice condensed into final moments.

Nele, particularly, regaled in the family company while it lasted.

“Be careful in tasting plants from afar,” Nohanam suggested to his older sister. At fourteen, he was becoming very invested in the medicine and herbalism in which his mother had been deemed an expert; though, unlike Donata, he found contemplating the spiritual side of the Service, too. “Many look similar to things we have home but may not be the same. Use caution even when you think you know – when it comes to food, do a mouth-test, and when it comes to medicine, under-dose at first. Something like the soil quality can be enough to change potency.”

“Be wary of strangers,” suggested the man of Nele’s hearth, a tanned-skinned, wiry man, who showed very few of his forty years on his face. He did not share his mate’s skills in medicine; his advice was of a worrying parent quality.

“Jonadam,” Donata chided to her mate. “You can talk to strangers,” she said, turning to Nele. “But remember that other groups may not see you as we do.” A knowing glare cast through her yellow-green eyes. “Keep Ronata nearby. Do not share pleasures with just anyone. Do not try to trick them.”

“Mother!” Nele said, exasperated. “It isn’t _tricking.”_

“They may not see it so charitably, though,” Donata said.

Nele sighed.

“Treat others like the medicine plants, then,” Nohanam said. “Don’t take too much without a mouth-test.”

Donata and Nele made sounds of disgust. Jonadam said nothing.

On a hot, dry, afternoon, about half a moon before the Summer Longday, the group rounded the hill to arrive at the cave site of the meeting. Many groups were already bustling about, but the group had little trouble finding a campsite near the center of the action, as their cave and the Seventeenth counted many kin between them, and a prime place had been implicitly assigned.

Ronata enlisted help from Munavan to throw up her tent as quickly as possible, tossing her backframe into the dwelling as soon as it was up. She quickly unwove her waist-length brown hair and ran a teasel through it. Though she preferred to keep her hair in braids, she knew that her braided traveling hair would end up feeling stiff on her skull throughout the longer journey to come, so she took advantage of the occasion of rest to leave it loose. Many women preferred elaborate buns with braids sewn into them, often weaving colourful thongs or green grasses into the tresses. Ronata put up a front of disinterest in the trends of the day, but secretly she was also quite proud of the length of her hair, and enjoyed occasionally reminding people of its volume outside its braid. Nele, on the other hand, often preferred to keep her hair tied back in summer, when the warm moisture of the air rendered it a dark puff akin to a cattail.

“Ronata,” rang her mother as the young woman was about to leave the tent. “Aren’t you going to get fixed up a little nicer than that before seeing everyone?”

“Ah. Well, hand me my scallop-shell necklace,” she replied after a brief consideration. “And I’ll take a leather thong for my wrist in case I need to tie back my hair.

“You always wear it tied back.”

“Yes, if I’m hunting or cooking. It’s a mess otherwise.”

Nerina bustled forward. Plump and beaky-nosed, with wide hazel eyes, she looked rather little like her daughter, nor did they share much in personality. Yet her high, empathetic voice often evoked Ronata’s love, for all she could be annoying. Soon, Nerina was plucking at the girl, picking loose strands from her tunic and ruffling her hair with the teasel. “Would you like me to do buns?”

“I hate buns, mother.”

“Well, you should at least part your hair in the center. Side-parts are for boys.”

“No, mother. I like my side part.” She did not mention she enjoyed the fact that it was _for boys –_ it was a nest of bees she knew best not to crack open.

“Well, don’t make yourself less beautiful on Nele’s account.”

“I don’t, mother.”

“Because you may see someone tonight you haven’t seen in a while.”

“Of course, mother. Of course.”

“Are you sure you don’t want buns done?”

Ronata slipped out of the tent before offering a verbal answer, tailbone-length copper hair sweeping behind her shoulders like a cape.

A short but somewhat sturdy man with glossy, black hair stood near a frame, talking to someone who was stretching a hide. He had the contrite look on his face he often got when wishing he could wiggle free of a disinterested conversation.

Ronata recognized the expression at a distance, and ran towards him with uncharacteristic zeal. She wrapped the young man in a bear hug and dramatically twirled him around.

“Darandar my little fool! I have missed you!”

The contrite look remained on the man’s face, “Can you not pick me up? People will see!”

She put him down, a bit embarrassed. “Sorry. I forgot about…your mate. I know she is the type who would not like to see you manhandled,” she added with a bit of ribbing humour.

“Well I had not meant for this to be the first thing I tell you after so long, but, uh,” he said, shifting his feet, “I have severed the knot with Sheviza.”

Ronata, hands lingering on Darandar’s shoulders, had a tight, unreadable expression on her lips. She didn’t know if she should pretend to be surprised, or if it was more important to hide the fact she was indeed a bit pleased to know her friend was no longer attached to this particular woman. Her sentiments were mixed, so in an instant, she spoke: “Do you have plans for the evening meal? Why don’t you come to our camp this evening, I’ll make you some food? And you can tell me about it. Munavan and Luzacam are looking forward to seeing you, too. And of course, Nele.”

Darandar smiled. “Luzacam,” he chuckled, “I haven’t hardly spoken to him since I mated. I feel like he’s mad at me.”

Ronata had been a bit out of touch with her friends at the time, but she recalled that a few summers earlier, the two young men had taken up with a pair of female cousins from the Seventeenth cave. It didn’t work out for long with Luzacam and his woman, but Darandar was quite smitten with the cousin, a slender blond woman a few years his junior. She was a little younger to be mated, but he was nearing his late teens. Ronata couldn’t pretend to fully understand Luzacam’s perspective, but she supposed that maybe, a little like she did, he had a somewhat childish resentment of a new woman stealing his friend to another cave. Or perhaps more had happened on his end of the affair. Luzacam had been tight-lipped. Well, no matter, Ronata thought. Darandar might come home to their cave, with Sheviza out of the picture.

Darandar nodded affirmatively. “Sure, if you don’t mind that I’m still a bit of a picky eater. Sheviza gave up on cooking for me pretty quickly.”

Ronata smirked. Known as a good cook, her secret ingredient was not simply an herb or a roasting technique, but her tendency to keep a tight memory of the preferences of her friends and kin, always being sure to select foods she’d known they liked. “No mushrooms and no blackcurrants. I know.” 

He smiled in return, appreciating her memory.

“How about,” Ronata looked towards a space mostly devoid of tents and raised a hand to the horizon, “You come to my camp when the sun is, say…eight fingers from the earth?”

Darandar sat on the ground beside Munavan. He had been nearly perturbed by the bigger man’s brazenness when he entered the camp – Munavan strutted over to him, chest puffed in mock aggression, and cracked into raucous laughter when Darandar started to cower slightly. Munavan slammed him in the back with a meaty paw and encouraged him to take a seat beside him, immediately starting a ribbing about the pleasures of mated life wearing off. He cut his joking off short when he notices Ronata shaking her head back and forth from the cooking fire, looking at him with big, critical eyes.

With Munavan as an intermediary, Darandar started some pleasant small talk with Luzacam, which ramped up to playful banter before the food was even served. Perhaps he’d been worried about nothing if their friendship was rekindling this quickly. They chatted about the mundane parts of the recent news, with occasional comments tossed from Ronata at the cooking fire. They skirted the issue of Darandar’s mate.

Ronata served onto flattened antler platters a tender horse steak seasoned with cicely and a sort of mildly pungent mustard leaf. On the side, a mix of knobby, reddish-violet roasted carrots and perky beige roasted parsnips were drizzled with a reasonable serving of melted fat. A salad of dandelion leaves with dried currants sat in a hollow-wood bowl, but she didn’t plate it, allowing her companions to serve themselves.

She took her own plate and sat to the other side of Darandar, who was now sandwiched between her and Munavan.

“So,” she began, trying to have a bit of tact, “I think you have a story to tell, Rand.”

He shoveled a glistening parsnip into his mouth and as he finished chewing, he began.

“So yeah, as you might have figured out, I’ve severed the knot.”

Ronata couldn’t help but notice a little grin cutting across Luzacam’s bearded face, but Darandar had not been looking his way.

“I’m sure some of you aren’t surprised, and maybe some of you are even happy. I can’t be mad about that, I know none of my friends liked her that much. But it’s hard to explain until it’s you. She wasn’t really this beast you might have thought she was, she was just, troubled. And I could put up with it for a while.”

Nele had a perplexed look on her face. She had not been as close with Ronata’s old friends at the time where Darandar left to join with Sheveza, and being even near Darandar now stirred her with anxiety, however pleasant and congenial he seemed. Darandar noticed her vexation; a quick glance to the less-familiar girl prompted him to summarize: “It was about three years ago when I met Sheveza; her and her cousin Livola, they were, I guess fourteen or so, the age where young women love to help out on hunts, especially when a few caves hunt together, because it’s a great time to get to know eligible men. I don’t know what we so alluring about her…she got so squeamish when we were processing the meat. I found it cute, somehow. Anyway, we mated, I was in love, it happens. And I’ll say I was so happy for the first year or two. When we’d been in isolation for the post-matrimonial period, I felt like I could have stayed tied to her twice as long…” he stared off, a bit wistful, and absently stuffed more carrots into his mouth. There was a silence while he chewed. “Anyway, perhaps that was a bad sign. I think we loved each other too much, if that makes sense. She wanted to do everything with me. And it was wonderful at first, but during the second winter I realized how lonely it could be to be so far from my kin and my friends – I never really found many people to care about here. And she never brought any children into my hearth. I’d have lost my mind without Kenalal…” he trailed off again, seeming to calculate which portions of his story he wanted to share, perhaps fearful of looking too vulnerable. “Truth is, we severed the knot early last winter. But I couldn’t really stop seeing her. I still can’t. And we still even…you know. Probably more than we did when we were mated.”

The rest of the companions stifled a laugh.

“I wonder if I regret severing the knot. But then I think, there’s so much more in the world. I’ve made friends here that I’ve only gotten to know _since_ severing the knot. It’s funny. I was here two years but it’s like I wasn’t here at all… Actually, I will introduce you to one of my good friends at the full moon festival. This guy makes amazing brew, it’s….anyway. So, I guess that’s that. I’m no storyteller. I think I’m taking my time this meeting to decide if I’ll go back to your cave. Maybe even live with my mother and her mate again. ”

Ronata considered him for a moment, and exchanged a meaningful glance with Munavan.

“Darandar, we, um, we might have a better plan,” she cleared her throat, “Me, and Munavan, and Nele, and Luzacam, we are going on a journey. A long one, I think, and….” She was reluctant to phrase this too explicitly.

“You should absolutely come, _Rand_.” Munavan said, with a cheeky sardonicism on the shortening of his friend’s name. “Get some of that brew from your friend. It will be a big, never-ending party. You can meet women from other tribes, hey, men too if you want. And some of them won’t even speak our language so that’s a lot less nonsense to deal with.” He wiggled a brow suggestively,

“And then, if you decide to come home, you’ll come home with us.” Luzacam added, “For good, instead of leaving the team for a woman!”

Nele wriggled with excitement at the idea of the strange and charming dark-haired man joining their traveling party. Ronata tried to conceal her anticipation, fearing that she’d be disappointed by his rejection of the offer.

Darandar was chewing an edge of horsesteak thoughtfully. He swallowed. “I’m going to think about it.” From his mother’s hearth, straight to the hearth of a mate, Darandar had spent his whole life feeling passed around. This crack through which he could slip – in this ephemeral point in his life where he _could_ slip away – was so tempting that he needed to stop himself from barreling forward in approval. He chose his words wisely. “I think, though, that I’d be down for anything.”

The four other friends hooted in revelry. Shortly thereafter, Ronata served a dessert to end the meal: walnuts pounded into an oily meal, held together with honey and the dried and crushed petals of sweet violet, pressed into little cubes. The confectionary was dusted with more dried violet petals and walnuts crumbled on top. The five of them – each having a notable sweet tooth – savoured them while dreaming and plotting their future on the open road.


	3. Chapter 3

A festival occasion occurred on the evening of the full moon. It was a little tardy for a genuine kickoff celebration to the meeting, but it was agreed that the biggest celebrations would be best held once every cave had arrived, and that moment had come at last.

Ronata, usually interested in the preparation of food, found herself rather smothered by the number of older women and mothers who congested the cooking areas, nickering like a herd of mares and speaking of things she could scarcely relate to. She decided at last that offering a few preemptive suggestions and ducking out during the final preparations would be sufficient.

“I’ve explained my flatcakes recipe to Kajona like three times, mother,” Ronata said as she returned to her familial hearth. “If she can’t figure it out from there, Doni help her.”

“That’s good that you showed her, though; she will think highly of you,” Nerina said with insinuations gurgling beneath her words.

“I’m not mating Luzacam, mother, once again. He is my _cousin_.”

“The man of his hearth is of blood relation; that makes you far-cousins, not close-cousins,” Ronadal corrected. Ronata cast an unimpressed look to the man of her hearth. She respected this man: his wavy brown hair, and beard shot with glimmers of grey and red gave some echoes to the appearance of the daughter of his hearth. Beyond his appearance, however, his dry humour and frank nature had been inherited by Ronata, who’d been named for him. There was no doubt that the Mother had selected Ronadal’s spirit to mix with Nerina’s when Ronata had been kindled – it showed in, in both her personality and her physicality and motion. Yet Ronadal, unlike the daughter of his spirit, had a particular interest in being _right._

“Yes, and I’m sure since your mother took you in as a foundling, it would be great for you to have mated your sister Geliza, hm?”

Ronadal chuckled. “She’s not wrong.”

“Well, forget that,” Nerina said, rummaging through her packs for additional cooking tools. “I have heard interesting news.”

“Yes?”

“Darandar has scattered the hearth, isn’t that lovely?”

“ _Lovely_ is a strange choice of words,” Ronata replied, “But yes, in fact I’m happy for him. He was not happy with Sheveza – she is like a wolverine.”

“I am not encouraging you or forcing you one way or another,” Nerina said, knowing well that the caveat was necessary, “But you should consider the implications of that.”

Ronata was briefly dumbstruck. Was Nerina suggesting she _join_ with _Darandar?_ “Mother, I already have somebody in mind. You know this.”

“Well, Konardan is already on his way to mating, and he’s three years younger. You still have no children to bring to a hearth.”

“When it happens, it happens. I’m in no hurry yet.”

“Well you will soon count twenty,” Ronadal finally intervened. “I’m glad you have reconnected with your friends and become more active in hunting and gathering and all that, but this could be the year.”

“If I am to start a hearth, I already know who it would be with,” Ronata protested.

“Well, be practical,” Ronadal argued. “Once you have children at your hearth, you may need a man to help out.”

“And that is if you are even blessed. You have spent so much time with Nele – perhaps her spirit is not fit to make children.”

“What in the Mother’s dark underworld do you mean by that?”

“I don’t mean to make offense,” Nerina soothed. “It’s just, sometimes people who are…built incorrectly… cannot make children.”

Ronata sighed and swallowed her discomfort. As much as she longed to stand up to her mother’s prodding, sometimes it cut deep despite her efforts. Ronata unconsciously placed a hand on her lower belly. It’s true, she realized, that in her nineteen years she’d yet to be blessed, even though she’d honoured the Mother with both men and women. Perhaps Nele’s spirit really did have something _wrong with it –_ perhaps it did put up a barrier. “Well, I’m actually quite pleased to not be blessed right now. You can’t go on a long journey with a baby.”

“No. But I wish you weren’t going so far,” Nerina said.

“I promise I’ll be back, guys. I’ll be gone a year, maybe.”

“That’s definitely what Loshanan said when he left, too.” Nerina said, voice breaking into a whiny tone.

“Oh, come on. It’s different. I’ll be with my friends. I’m sure they’ll want to come home, too.”

“Well you will keep an open mind, won’t you?”

Ronata was unsure what her mother meant by this. “I’m going to the Men’s Lodges, and then hanging out with Darandar, okay? I’ll see you maybe tonight, maybe in the morning.”

“A woman your age shouldn’t be around there so much,” Nerina chastised.

“Well, look at it this way, mother. If I’m around that many male spirits, a baby has got to start in me eventually, right?”

Ronata weaved through crowds towards the far-lodges where single men often stayed. She’d always been drawn to them and could count many friends in the area. Women were of course allowed there, most of the time, but their presence often came for different reasons than that of men: it was usually assumed that a woman who would dwell in the area was seeking an easy source of pleasures from a hungry, unattached man. Though Ronata had stolen some kisses in these lodges in her years – from men and women alike – her visits were mainly for the purpose of friendly, platonic companionship with her many male friends. The stigma that she must have been _seeking something_ made a younger Ronata so reluctant to come near the area, even to speak to a specific male friend. The adult Ronata had lost most of those fears – she’d usually appear with her hair in a ragged tress and wearing her hunting clothes – so austere that many didn’t recognize her for a woman at first glance. She didn’t take Nele with her, though. Nele regaled feminine social stature, often denied to her in her younger years, and had little interest in trying to masquerade as a man. 

She found Munavan squatted on a stump, playing a game of knuckle-bones with two companions.

“You can’t count, Kozanar. Legitimately, I think your skull is full of knuckle-bones,” he scolded.

“No, man,” said a muscular, blond man with a sharp, airy quality to his voice, “Landing on the broad side is worth 2. That’s why they’re big.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Why would the big side be worth more?”

“Listen, you go hunting, you get the biggest cow, you get status, right?” Kozanar suggested, taking an educated tone.

“No, you gourd, _you_ listen. If you go hunting and one guy throws a spear into the sky, and hits one bird on the wing, is that more impressive than the other guy who hits some fat ox that looks about as mobile as a boulder?”

Kozanar began to protest, and some shrugs and murmurs were expressed by a third, dark haired man. Ronata looked on in bemusement. Listening to Munavan complain about the reasoning skills of the two men who generally rounded out his building team was a great source of entertainment to her. She didn’t know them as well as he did – they often shared lodgings during voyages, and when there was a large boat-building project to be done by the river and it would be more efficient to camp near it.

“I’m not going to give my opinion,” Ronata finally contributed, drawing attention away from the game. “The festival is starting soon. We were going to meet with Darandar and his new friend who makes the brew, remember? Have a few drinks before the meal to get sufficiently prepared for the evening.”

Munavan planted his hands on both knees and rose from his seat. “Alright, fellas,” he said, “Have a good evening.”

“Joradam and Kozanar can come, too, if they want.”

“I promised Kadina I’d see her at the festival, but I think she’d looking after her sister’s children right now, so yeah,” Joradam offered. Kozanar followed, and the group made their way to the center of the gathering area.

A huge bonfire was lit in the centre of a clearing, on the edge of the central camping site. Surrounding the fire were numerous finely-carved benches, many of which had soft hides and even soft, furry cushions. It was clear from the worn-down earth and the decorative seating that the area was not a makeshift addition for the summer meeting, but an area often employed for gathering in the day-to-day lives of the seventeenth cave.

Munavan and his tribe approached Darandar, who was standing with a taller man with dark hair and serious, brown eyes.

“Kenalal,” Munavan said casually with a nod.

Kenalal gave a modest smile, and Darandar grinned brightly, already slightly flushed from brew. “You made it!” He hesitated. “Of course you made it. You’re camped thirty paces away. But greetings! I hope you brought thirst, and maybe cups, because we are running low. On cups, I mean. The brew, there’s plenty of that.”

In a festival setting, with so much food and drink abounding, many people kept their eating knives and sometimes their own small dish or cup in their haversacks or clipped to their belts when they were walking around. With so many familiar and unfamiliar faces and a general air of hospitality, one did not always know where they’d end up taking their evening meal, and it would lessen the burden of the hosts if guests could at least provide their own cutlery, if not an edible contribution to a meal. Three of the four members of Munavan’s party produced drinking vessels – one simple, sanded wooded cup, and two hollow aurochs horns, which offered a more festive visual appeal, but could be clumsy since they could not be set down without tipping. Joradam was quickly offered another piece of drinkware.

A slightly older man, stout with thinning hair, approached jovially carrying a bulging, jiggling stomach bag full of strong, fermented liquid.

“Your friends!” he said brightly.

“Let me handle the introductions, you’ll do it rudely, as usual,” Munavan murmured, nudging Ronata.

“No,” she hissed back, “I can do it. And Darandar is _my_ friend more than yours.”

“No way, I knew him since,” they gestured briefly at each other before realizing the man with the brew was looking at them. Ronata cleared her throat and started a formal introduction.

“I am Ronata of the Twentieth Cave of the Zelandonii, child of Nerina, born to the hearth of Ronadal, second-in-command and hunt master. This is Munavan, master builder, son of Danira….” She listed off the names, hesitating briefly when she forgot the name of Kozanar’s mother.

“And promised to Kadina,” Kozanar added with a smirk,

“Man, stop it,” Joradam said to him with a playful nudge.

Ronata held her hands out in greeting.

“Denicol. Master brewer,” said the man, passing his sack of brew to Kenalal and grasping Ronata’s forearms. He didn’t mention family ties, Ronata thought. It could be he has no living parentage, or no longer associates with his hearth. Ronata couldn’t judge, as there had been many times where she’d been annoyed enough with her family to want to drop their names from her ties. Her mother’s mate did have high status, though, and his own given name made it clear they were related, so she never neglected to mention them. 

“Master, huh,” Munavan challenged, conspicuously holding out his aurochs horn.

“I’ve been perfecting my fermentation recipe and my technique for years,” he said, “My cousin here will give you a sample, if you want.”

Kenalal rolled his eyes slightly and unplugged the vertebra stopper. He poured a splash of the liquid into the horn, and the other guest’s cups soon followed. Munavan took a sip and swished his mouth.

“It tastes so clean,” he said, genuinely impressed.

“Almost…. Fresh,” Ronata added, downing the rest of her cup very quickly, “Like chewing pine needles to clean your breath.”

“The secret is juniper,” Denicol said, “But not just the berries, the twigs too, with their needles. Fruit wines are one thing, but this brew is far more powerful,” he said with a chuckle.

The friends had acknowledged statement of the beverage’s potency, but did not fully realize its extent. The bag was passed around the fire a few more times until the sky was black except the shimmering white plate of the full moon. By then, their heads were swimming. Joradam, for one, didn’t even realize he’d walked away still holding his host’s cup.


	4. Chapter 4

Nele had needed to down a few horns of Denicol’s brew in a hurry when she’d arrived at their bonfire. Caught up with her mother, herself quite occupied as a reputable healer, she’d let time escape her and hadn’t joined her friends until they were nearly ready to wrap up their pre-festival revelry. They’d been playing some sort of game with numbers when she’d met up with them, and they were too engrossed for her to comfortably insert herself in a later round.

Walking to the central area where the festival was underway, Nele felt feather-light and disoriented. The orange firelight bled into the edges of her vision, and she felt quite giggly. Luzacam greeted her with a nod, and she stopped in her tracks in front of his seated form. He had before him a drum made of a stiff wooden frame, molded when soaked into a circle, with a thin skin stretched over it. He beat upon it with his hand, though he also kept leather-tipped wood and bone sticks with him to produce a wider variety of sounds on command. Nele, always intrigued by anything musical, began to sway, enthralled with the steady beat he pulsed from his instrument. Under regular circumstances, she was too shy for dancing, but the mist of the juniper brew and the lively aura of the party encouraged her to writhe with abandon. She quickly longed for company – she wished, perhaps, the bearded drummer could join her, but she wouldn’t want him to stop his wonderful music. When she’d paused to listen to him, she’d lost track of Darandar, Ronata, and Munavan.

Joradam and Kozanar having already slipped away to join their women – a sweetheart, in Joradam’s case, and whoever showed interest, in Kozanar’s – Darandar, Ronata, and Munavan threw aside their sense of propriety and fear in a drunken glee and danced erratically, attempting to outdo one another in ridiculousness. Darandar flapped his limbs wildly, and Munavan launched his meaty feet before him like weapons. Munavan narrowly missed kicking a portly, older woman in the thigh with an errant foot. She rolled her eyes in disgust. The three paused to catch their breath, doubled in laugher. Munavan caught another women watching the spectacle – a younger woman, slim with wavy hair and dressed in a lovely fringed dress. She seemed quite amused as well, and wordlessly, they were drawn together. As a big man with a boisterous personality, Munavan was not always the most alluring, often choosing to squabble with attractive women rather than flirt with them in earnest. To see such a bald display of attraction from a woman so pretty was quite exciting. The pair began to slip away from the former trio.

Nele stumbled about, quickly distracted every time she came upon a friend or an attractive face. Her natural shyness had been blunted by the drink. She would like to ask Darandar for a dance – she’d been quite charmed by him before. It didn’t need to lead to anything – people did often take festivals as an occasion to honour the Mother by sharing in her gift, even those in stable relationships often feeling free to dabble in something more novel, but it was not mandatory. Dancing was festive enough. Nele never let herself get too secure in further pursuits. She’d been burned enough. And, she thought, a kiss might be the most special of the Mother’s pleasurable gifts. Maybe that, at least, wasn’t too much to hope for. In her musing, she reached the edge of a knot of people and saw Ronata and Darandar, alone. They danced with little space between them. In a bittersweet moment of clarity amidst her haze, she decided to leave them alone.

Darandar and Ronata were not exactly dancing anymore; they were lightly swaying. They had their foreheads nearly touching while chattering and occasionally giggling, but the conversation had turned serious, with the honesty that fermented brew and late nights can provide.

“So that’s when I knew, I guess,” he summarized, “That it really should be over.”

“I want to say I’m sorry to hear that,” she responded tenderly, “But it’s clear from what you’ve told me that you’re better off. And it hurts. But you’re free, right? At least she didn’t have children yet,” she finished offhandedly.

“You know,” he said, slurred, face near, “You’ve always been one of my best friends. I’m glad…” he trailed off, glancing askew. The cold eyes of Sheveza met his, and he froze. “She would never let me go off in festivals.”

“I know some people can feel jealous if their mates couple with someone else, but we’re just standing here. And you aren’t even mated anymore.” Ronata said, lightly tapping his chin in the hope of peeling his eyes away from his former flame. It was fruitless, so Ronata turned her head to watch what he’d been observing. Barely breaking eye contact with Darandar, the blond woman reached her fingers behind the neck of a tall man facing her, and pulled him in for a kiss. She had a venomous look in her eyes that made Ronata sneer, but it perturbed her to turn back to her friend and see him wide-eyed like a hunted rabbit.

He paled, and said he didn’t feel well.

“Are you feeling well?” Munavan said with genuine concern as the pretty woman took on a glazed look. She danced tightly against him.

Brazen, but with a decontracted tone, she said “You feel quite soft. I like it.”

Munavan felt a stronger stirring – though, realistically, his groin had been very alert for quite a while. Yet he felt ill at ease. She led him by the hand towards a tent, pulled open the curtain, and dragged him inside. She began to untie the thongs on her dress, and Munavan started to allow himself to feel excited. She lowered herself to the ground, still drunkenly fiddling with the knots, and beckoned him to do the same.

As soon as he was beside her on her furs, she pushed him away, and made a strange grunting noise. In the dim tent, Munavan wasn’t fully sure what was happening until he heard the wet slosh of vomit hitting the ground.

In the morning, the party of friends sat awkwardly in front of a weakly flickering cooking fire, sipping tea. Nele dejected, Ronata conflicted, Darandar grieving, and Munavan trying to clear the thought of vomit out of his mouth with every minty sip. Luzacam and Kenalal sat with them, eying each inquisitively and wondering what kind of shenanigans had occurred at the festival. Usually, morning-after chittered with reminiscing. A thought began to propagate through the small group without it being spoken out loud: maybe it really would be the best time to take a temporary leave from the Zelandonii. In the festive mood of the meeting, they’d been reluctant to leave. But with a dose of uncomfortable reality, they began to set their sights on something new.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

Nele was suddenly far more conscious of the limited time she had left with her family and spent her remaining days at the Summer Meeting mostly with them. It was of particular importance to her to spend some time with her grandparents, too – she was fortunate enough that all four had survived into her adulthood, and while they were in good health for their age, a long, distant journey brought the morbid reality that the travelers could not know for sure until the moment they returned home if their elderly relatives were still walking this world. Nele’s grandam had been the one to first teach her the feminine art of beading; her granda had shared with her countless stories of their tribal history. With Donata often taken away by the busy life of a healer, the hearth of Nele’s mother’s mate had been partially responsible for raising her. Donata’s hearth, too, had done their fair share of babysitting, and Nele therefore split much of the remaining summer days between the four elders.

However, one day, very close to her departure, she made time for her little brother. Though not accented by the morbid loom of death, Nele knew a year without contact could change a lot in the life of a young person, too. His farewells also served a practical, not solely emotional, purpose. 

“So, for burns: cool, clean water, not too cold. This balm works if the burn is pink, but not if it’s red. Don’t put anything on it if it’s too red; it will hold in the heat.”

Nele was nodding her head as her younger sibling prattled on. Nohanam had just counted his fourteenth year and had blossomed well into his knowledge of healing magic. “This fluff makes good packing for casts, if anybody gets a sprain, and oh, in a bind it can be used to pack a woman’s moontime strap.” He cut himself off quickly from this line. “Also, you might need to talk to a full-service Zelandoni before you go, since I might have a few blind spots in the spiritual side of things. Oh! And also, I made a special tea just for you! Red clover, alfalfa, and dried sunflower root – it tastes pretty sweet, and I made sure to perfect a brew that will help you with your…affliction.”

Nele smiled at him as he chattered down numerous tributaries at once. Nohanam’s flamboyant and straightforward manner contrasted so much with hers; he was the spitting image of their mother, while Nele evoked the melancholy and introversion of the man of their hearth.

Nohanam finally offered his sister a hefty sack of herbs, poultices, and balms, after explaining their uses. Though Nele nodded enthusiastically during his entire tirade, she privately recognized that her general response to any ache was to chug willow bark tea, and that it would probably continue to be her response throughout the journey. Nonetheless, she was grateful for the clover and alfalfa tea, at the very least. It demonstrated an extra level of care that her brother had produced something with Nele specifically in mind.

Nele was fortunate enough to have a particularly friendly and loving relationship with the other members of her hearth, but even those who were more lukewarm on their parental figures spent a few final days in their well-wishing and preening. Munavan offered some time to his mother, all while obliquely ignoring the man of his mother’s hearth, who he’d always found glib and rude. He also bid farewell to Joradam, who was participating in the matrimonial and would therefore be in isolation when Munavan and the party left. Luzacam wasn’t born to the hearth of his mother’s much-older mate, but he had fond feelings for both, as well as for his older brother, Markolam, whose mate was pregnant again. His mother ribbed him about how he didn’t have his eye on a possible mate though he neared nineteen, and she expressed hoped he’d bring a woman back from his journeys. Darandar, the only child of his hearth, disappointed his mother and her mate greatly by announcing his intent to depart after scattering his mating, instead of moving home with them. Ronata’s parents, inversely, seemed almost breathlessly relieved that her announcement was that of a journey, and not that she was planning a mating to Nele. Every conversation Ronata had shared with them since the start of the meeting reinforced her perception that they secretly hoped that a long journey with several male friends would bring Ronata back home promised to Luzacam or Darandar.

At last Kenalal, the serious dark-eyed cousin of Denicol, simply appeared with the travelling group on the morning of their departure, with little to say about his farewells. Kenalal had decided to join the party without much thought or discussion – when Darandar announced his intent, he simply started packing, too. Since both lived at the cave of the meeting, they would not need to go out of their way to retrieve important items left behind. Though the other members of the group had known him – Luzacam somewhat well in childhood – only Darandar truly counted him as a close friend in adulthood. The others were somewhat bemused by his inclusion, especially since he remained generally tight-lipped in the days leading up to the journey.

Not long before departure, it was Kenalal who suggested the party lay out their belongings and check for redundancies or blind spots. Some of the travelers groaned, as they did not want the hassle of unpacking the sacks they had just finished puzzling together. Most recognized, however, that he was making a very wise suggestion, and it subtly painted Kenalal as a thoughtful planner, and therefore useful to their trip. Ronata, especially, made the fair consideration that with Munavan and she being as brash as they were, and with Nele and Darandar being so charmingly empty-headed at times, it would be not just useful, but possibly lifesaving to have a voice of reason to round out the group. She was careful not to tell him this yet – no man would be bossier than one who _believed_ himself a good boss.

The party stared down at their array of items. Each person had set aside one or two simple outfits for traveling, made of sturdy but light buckskin. These outfits were minimally decorated and somewhat loosely-fitting, and both men and women chose leggings and shorter tunics instead of anything draped or long. During their travels, they’d be wearing the same clothes day in and day out, sometimes even sleeping in them, and they’d have less occasion to give them a good wash. They’d also be exposed to a wide array of elements, from cooking fire smoke, to sweat and body odour, to rain, and even blood – hopefully of animals, and not of themselves. It was best to not get too emotionally attached to the outfits, because by the time they’d reached their destination, there’d be little hope for them except to be cut into cleaning cloths or even the waste-thongs women used to hold their menstrual packing.

The group also carried a few items of nicer clothing. They tended towards things that were not only beautiful, but thoroughly represented the culture of their region, to give them a distinctive and exotic look if they were lucky enough to be invited to foreign ceremonies or special events. Nele kept the dark-coloured gown she’d selected earlier, and a selection of her handwoven belts and sashes, some of which she’d surely trade. Ronata, for all her tomboyish trappings, also kept a rather feminine dress with long, shoulder-revealing sleeves and accents of amber and pearl. The men had tunics decorated with various tails and feathers.

In addition to Nohanam’s medicine bag that he left with Nele, some of the friends kept quick remedies on hand. The signature willowbark for pain, along with birchbark for stomach ailments – particularly useful since new, unknown foods could be found in their journey that might not agree with them – and betony, whose soft, wide leaves made good bandages. Denicol had entrusted Darandar with a pouch of his favorite brewing plants; carrying a large bag of the finished drink would be too burdensome, and a waste of space that would be more practically served for fresh water. Besides, they wouldn’t want to get drunk on the open road, and any tribe they chose to temporarily settle with would surely make its own brew. It was an essential part of human culture: be it fruit, roots, leaves, honey, tubers, or sugar, if it could ferment into a liquid that put a person into that enticing, dreamy state of intoxication, mankind would try it.

Much of the food they’d need to eat could be harvested along the way, especially since the earliest phases of their travels would occur in the late summer and early autumn, when fruits swelled on trees and the animals were abundant and well-fed. The travelers – especially Kenalal and Ronata, who had a talent for cooking – did bring with them dried seasoning. Of particular importance was salt, which was harder to find the further into the continent they went. While the ocean was nearly a moon’s walk from where they lived, and it was no quick jaunt to get there, it was still relatively simple to trade for salt. They knew that the further inland they went, the more they’d need the salt, not just for the seasoning and preservation of food, but as a compact and valuable currency. As far as ready-to-eat foods went, they had a large amount of dried meat – ungulates like horse, deer, and bison made a chewy, red jerky that could be nicely seasoned and was at least somewhat appetizing, even if it could get repetitive. Other animals, like rabbit, did not dry well and had a tough, gamey quality that would only be desirable if the chewer was literally starving. They also carried traveling cakes, both the traditional meaty kind, held together with pungent bearfat, and the sweeter variety that Nele had helped Ronata cook up, which had a delicate taste of maple, dried crabapple, and a pleasant, gritty chew from oat-like cereal crops. 

While everyone had at least some ability to do the tasks required to survive, each member of the party had stronger expertise and enjoyment of certain crafts. The friends were pleased to see how adept their newest member, Kenalal, was at flintknapping. He had patient, steady hands, and having worked since a young age, he was able to rapidly whittle out items by firelight that would take an amateur far longer in optimal conditions. Most people could make a handaxe or a knife that could be jammed into an antler handle, but it took practice to make the more specialized tools like delicate piercers and awls. In addition, a discerning eye that could find flint in the field would be far preferable than carrying heavy rocks everywhere they went to replace poorly-made tools. Luzacam was a carver with an artistic eye, and was capable of making instruments like his drum and its mallets. His skill could also be put to more practical use: he could make bone handles to match Kenalal’s knife tips, or rib bone scrapers to work leather. Munavan, as a builder, would not have much use of his boatbuilding skills during their journey, but he could make extremely short work of putting up a shelter, which would prove useful when they’d make sleeping stops far from any settlement. Nele’s delicate hands could mend pouches and clothing, and Darandar worked well with wood, especially spear-making.

Ronata felt a little useless. Unlike her friends, she was not a master at most tasks that resulted in a durable product. She was an excellent cook who liked to experiment with novel ideas, and she had a great knowledge of edible plants, as well as carefully identifying unknown plants for safe eating. These skills could be useful when trying to repurpose dried meat for months on end while traveling. She was also a competent hunter and butcher, having learned from the man of her hearth. She also supposed her attuned sense of direction would come in handy for traveling. She concluded that, even though she’d have little to offer for trade or for gifts, it would perhaps be enough to make herself useful by keeping her friends fed and safe.

The morning dawned dewy and sweet. Ronata, always a morning person, awoke her friends with hyperactivity and a pot of sweet rosehip tea. She went with Darandar to fill the waterbags, and after some final, jittered preparation, the six friends headed east, towards the rising sun. Only a few antsy mothers saw them off. They were careful not to attract a crowd, as goodbyes could be painstaking.

“Are we going to have to leave at bird hour _every_ morning?” Luzacam griped, about halfway to noon.

“I doubt it,” Darandar said, “And I hope not.”

“I think we just needed to leave the meeting before everyone was up. You know how goodbyes can be.” Ronata answered to the party before her. She tended to linger at the back of a walking group.

“I will lose my mind if I don’t eat a morning meal.” Munavan said.

“I don’t usually eat a morning meal, but we will take tea in the morning, and maybe have travelling cakes. Make something fancy for dinner when we set up camp for the night,” Ronata called up.

“Traveling cakes, my favorite,” Nele said with a groan.

“My favorite!” Munavan echoed jovially, “I could eat an armload of these guys.”

“That has to last us as much of the way to the Losadunai as we can make them, Mune. It takes forever to render new fat, I only have a couple cakes of fat in my pack and I’d rather save them for cooking, and you only get that from big animals,” said Ronata.

“Why don’t we take a few days off traveling for a big hunt once the leaves start to turn? That’s when animals are fat,” Munavan said. After a slight pause – maybe a bit longer than needed for humour – he added, “Like me!”

He burst out an exaggerated laugh.


	6. Chapter 6

The summer wore on at a gentle, unhurried pace. The group decided that in the hot days where the sun beat down at noon but the sky stayed violet until very late, it would be better to make breakfast an optional traveling cake. They would instead have the biggest meal of the day at noon, so they could take a break at the warmest parts of the day. They could travel further by walking until near-dark, throwing the tent up just before twilight, and scarfing down some leftovers, before starting over the next day.

The golden, sun-bleached plains gave way to progressively thicker forests of mixed birch and pine as the travelers crossed into the territory that would one day become German soil. A bit further North lay a land very near to the great glaciers that draped the earth from the poles to the peninsula of Jutland. The glaciers encroached near enough to this land that their residual cold left the ground in a state permafrost, and their masses of ice sucked away the moisture from the ground and the air. That far north, few trees grew tall, unable worm their roots into the dry and solid earth. Nonetheless, in the softer soil on which the travelers currently tread, the birches grew slender and tall, in ancient woods minimally touched by the needs of man.

During the several -day stretch where they group walked through the proud birch stands, Ronata made an effort to collect a few rolls of bark from the fatter trees. She was careful to strip any given tree only partially – peeling too much of its protective skin away would kill the plant. Birch bark, with its smooth, papery finish the color of winter skin, had many uses. The sap wasn’t tasty like maple, but a decoction of it was useful for upset stomach. When rolled tightly and heated in a fire, it could weep a thick tar that made an excellent glue. The best usage to Ronata, though, was as a portable tablet for drawing. In a world before written word, note-taking was rather abstract, but drawing upon the bark with a sharpened, fire-blackened end of a stick, one could make a competent map. The austere squiggles of river and zig-zags of mountains were among humanity’s earliest attempts at representing the world symbolically in two dimensions.

One late summer day, the group began to detect a seasonally uncharacteristic nip in the air, paired with a faint, fresh odor.

“We must be getting close to the glacier,” Kenalal said, at the head of the pack. “At this time of year, the ice will probably be weeping water. Trying to climb over that thing would be like fishing for eels with our feet.” He spoke stoically but showed subtle appreciation for the chuckles his comparison incited.

“So, we’ll go North and around, then?” Darandar asked.

“Definitely, if we get closer to the glacier and walk its perimeter, I think it should be a half moon until we’re on the other side.” Kenalal responded.

“Why didn’t we go in the winter, then? If it’s possible to go over the glacier, would it have afforded us a shortcut?” Nele questioned.

“I hear people lose their fingers going over that glacier. And that’s if they’re lucky. It’s better than losing a nose,” Ronata cautioned. “Or eyes. It’s like those sunny winter days where you can barely see because the snow is so shiny. Except that’s all that you can see, everywhere.”

Nele grimaced.

“At least, that’s what I’ve heard,” Ronata tacked on. 

It was Darandar’s turn to grimace. “Wait, wait, I thought that the glaciers never ended. They’re the edge of the world, right?” He had not traveled much in his life, having covered little distance beyond his matrimonial move to the seventeenth cave. His only major venturing had come from his family’s ocean fishing trips, occurring sporadically throughout his youth.

“No, that’s much further north. At the most northern part of the world, where the sun goes at night, there is a wall of ice. Nobody knows if it goes on forever; if there’s anything beyond it. It might just be sky, like above us. But nobody would ever want to find out, because even if you could scale it – and I hear it’s taller than any mountain – you’d never be seen again.” Kenalal seemed rather educated on the topic. “The glacier segment near here isn’t a wall. It’s smaller than the total territory of the Zelandonii by a good margin. It’s just like an ice floe you’d see on a lake in Winter, but it’s too big to ever melt. We don’t know what’s under it.”

“So….is it a part of, uh, the Mother’s creation?” said Darandar, processing the information his friend had offered.

“I guess all things are. I don’t know, ask a Zelandoni.” Kenalal smirked. Not that he didn’t acknowledge spirits, but he preferred the tangible explanations of the world in front of him. The power of spirits was very real, yet he was wary of the fact that these things were beyond his control. The matter of spirits was for those adept at the study, and he’d rather talk stone. Stone was less mysterious – it was workable, shapeable.

“I know you can go around the north of the glacier,” Munavan added, “My friend who lives with the Losadunai say they go up there for rhino hunts now and again.”

“Alright,” Ronata said, back onto immediate matters. “The big question is, should we cross the river as soon as we get to the glacier, or after?”

“I guess that depends on how wide it is,” Kenalal mused, “We would want to cross at a narrow point. We’ll need a raft, anyway.”

“That sounds like tradesman work.” Munavan added with bravado.

“Okay so, plan. How about we set up camp a little early, and the fastest runner can go scout out the riverbank on the edge of the woods, and we’ll go from there?” Ronata offered.

Kenalal sighed and shrugged off his backframe. It hit the ground with a dull thud, and he rotated his shoulders in preparation for a solo jaunt.

The five friends prepared their sleeping arrangements in a soft, pine-scented clearing in the late afternoon. They laid a ground cover upon a downy bed of needles and spongy moss – a much more pleasant sleeping surface that the parched, hard earth they had contended with earlier in their voyage. They reinforced their tent with scavenged wood, making the camp a little homier than usual in case they decided to spend some extra time in the area in preparation for their river crossing. While the woods lacked the mighty herds of the plains, smaller creatures scuttled about in the underbrush, and they made for much more convenient eating on the fly.

Nele was lighting a pyramid-shaped fire in a makeshift stone pit when Luzacam and Munavan showed up with a couple of squirrels tied together by a thong. The small creatures were a lean snack, but their soft, red pelts were worth hanging onto. Ronata, Luzacam, and Munavan each went to work cleaning a squirrel for their evening meal, and handed the furs to Nele for her to further scrape and trim. Ronata, who had become the default cook of the group, stewed the slim carcasses in a skin pot hung over the fire. To the stew she added barley and pine nuts, which were abundant in the wooded area, and whose flavor complimented the mild, nutty taste of the beasts.

“If you know what an animal likes to eat, you know what to serve it with,” Ronata offered as a suggestion to no one in particular.

The group scooped up their evening meal without waiting for Kenalal’s return; they splashed a bit of water into the leftovers to prevent it from drying up as it continued to hang over the banked fire.

Darandar, always a rapid eater, hurried to swallow a mouthful of pulpy stew.

“What does the world really look like, then?”

“Hm?” Ronata said absently, pulling a squirrel bone from her mouth and tossing it into the fire.

“Kenalal seemed to know a lot about the ice at the edge of the world. And he knew about getting around the glacier.”

“I was wondering, too, actually. Has he traveled here before?”

“Not that I know of,” the man said, turning the squirrel around his mouth with his tongue. “You’re able to make squirrel taste pretty good.”

“Thanks,” she said with a smile. “So, as you might know, to the east, there’s the great water. No one knows how far it goes. And to the north is the ice, and no one knows how far it goes, either. To the east, where we’re going, it’s all land. But some people have said another sea exists on the other side. But then, that gives us the problem of what’s after _that_ sea, too.”

Nele piped up. “It would make sense to me that there’s another sea. Like, people have two eyes, birds have two wings. It seems the Mother makes things that match on both sides. Do you think that means that south, there’s another ice wall?”

“That sounds like a Zelandoni question, but you know, it actually makes a lot of sense.” She took a little more into her bowl, making sure to leave enough for her missing companion, and seconds for Munavan if his appetite demanded it. “Only problem is, everyone who goes south says it’s warmer there, and at the edge of the land, there’s more water.”

“But then,” Nele said, “A person could easily walk from the ice wall to the south sea in their lifetime. Actually, the traders can do it in a season if they don’t dawdle. But nobody ever walks from the west sea to this supposed east sea. So it must either be a lot bigger that direction, or maybe there’s more than we think in the south. But then, maybe it makes sense for it to be wider in the direction the sun travels. Would days be shorter if it wasn’t?”

“Maybe the sun knows how long it should take, and it would just travel faster?” Ronata mused.

“My head hurts,” moaned Darandar. “So like, is the world shaped like a flatcake? How did Doni give birth to it? How big is she?!”

Ronata scratched her neck and scrunched up her brow. “Now my head is hurting too. Maybe it’s like the rings on a tree, kind of a circle with ice all around?”

“But where’s the ice on the west?” Nele chirped.

“She got you there,” said Darandar, “What’s _under_ the earth?”

“More earth.”

“But what’s under _that?”_

The three friends stared into the fire, baffled. In their silence, they heard the rustling of Kenalal coming out of the darkening woods. He was breathing somewhat heavily – he hadn’t been running, but he’d jogged most of the way to get home before nightfall. Before he got the chance to report his findings, Darandar turned to him and immediately quizzed him:

“Kenalal, what’s under the earth?”

“More earth.”

“Great Earth Mother, I want a better answer. You’re supposed to be the wise one of the group, because we don’t have One Who Serves.” Darandar said with mock exasperation.

“I have heard people talk about the Mother’s mountains that bleed hot red fire,” he hurried to say, voice still staggered in his panting “Can I please report my findings now?”

“I want to hear more about the mountains, though.”

Kenalal rolled his eyes. “The earth bleeds fire. But it isn’t regular fire, it’s like fire if it was also water. I haven’t seen it, so I don’t understand it. So I think under the earth is the earth’s blood, which is hot like fire.” 

Darandar bit his lip, raised his eyebrows, and pondered for a moment. “Well, that’s a lot to think about.”

“Yeah. So there’s other things to think about: the river. Straight ahead of is, it is rather narrow. Narrow enough that if you could run it, you wouldn’t even get winded, and narrow enough that I could clearly see a deer drinking from the other side. So now would be as good a time as ever to cross.”

“So I guess we’ll stay put tomorrow to get working on a raft?” Luzacam suggested.

“Now you’re talking Munavan things!” Munavan, somewhat silent during the debate about glaciers, said with zeal.

“Now, Kella, eat your squirrel.” Ronata said with a nod towards the skin pot.


	7. Chapter 7

The next day, the traveling party walked the short distance from their camp to the edge of the wood near the river. They followed Munavan’s lead to put together a useable raft. While many peoples of the earth had figured out more refined methods of creating watercraft – bowl boats, wooden dugouts, or birchbark canoes, for example – the current party was not seeking something with that sort of longevity, but rather, a simple raft that served a purpose more akin to a ferry or even a bridge.

Boat-building was one of the common tasks assigned to Munavan at their home Cave. Despite his relative youth, he was quickly becoming a leader in building projects. His smart and fearless attitude was to some a bit boisterous for cave leadership, but for leading a hunting party or a building team, only those with a particular distaste for him would argue that he wasn’t an efficient leader.

He sent his company out in search of wood. He specified dead trees – withered and dried, but not rotted and full of bugs. These would be much more buoyant – the dense wood of fresh tree would sink unless it was dried out, and drying out the wood would demand that the group sit idly for days. Fortunately, Kenalal seemed to know something or other of boatmaking – though, as the party was discovering, Kenalal seemed to know _something or other_ about a great deal of things. He was quick to find a copse containing multiple trees that fit the description. With one of his larger flint axes, he and the other companions got to work chopping the trees into lengths about half again the size of a standing person. Trees chopped down with flint axes ended up looking not so different from ones chewed down by beavers; it was less damaging to the blade to cut through the trunk chip by chip than to attempt to slam through it lumberjack-style.

They paired up according to similarity in height – which left Munavan with some sarcastic grumbling, as he and Nele were the tallest, both breaking six feet, but the wispy woman was also the least physically strong of the group by a large margin. They carried the trees to the river’s edge. Munavan made short work of lashing the planks together with plant-fiber bands. Sometimes, leather would make a good binding agent, as it stiffened and tightened from exposure to moisture, but he did not have a mind for durability, preferring not to waste leather on a raft they’d leave behind.

Including the packs they brought with them, the group was too heavy to go across the water all at once. Luzacam was selected to serve as a ferrier, taking Nele and Munavan across with all of the backframes, paddling the raft across again, and making a final return trip with Ronata, Darandar, and Kenalal.

Thousands of years in the future, humans would wisely realize that a permanent stone structure known as a bridge would allow this section of the River Rhine to be crossed in about ten minutes on foot, instead of requiring an entire day’s work.

The eastern bank of the river was a fairly narrow strip of lowland flanked closely by steep, wooded mountains. It made for clear and direct walking, as the group never lost sight of the river. The presence of the river was also very helpful to their immediate needs: instead of rationing their waterbags until the next stop, they always had a source. This was only a problem when they reached areas where the water was especially slow-moving and a bit scummy.

They ate a good number of traveling cakes in this period, as the narrow grassy area they used as a path was not as rich in flora and fauna as the broad woods they’d recently left. They could occasionally catch some fish for the evening meal, which was welcome for its fresh taste and easy preparation – they only needed to be gutted from the underbelly and cooked wrapped in fragrant leaves or dry-cooked over a fire, which was a fraction of the effort it took to clean bigger game. Kenalal and Darandar were both picky with fish, poking around tentatively at tart, pink-fleshed trout, but finding the rarer, white-fleshed fish at least more palatable than another meal of boring cakes. In the shadow of the mountains, and so near to the glacier, they didn’t need to be as wary of the late summer heat, and they reverted to often taking a shorter lunch break and longer dinner. They took advantage of these longer dinners to set up little stone ovens full of crumbly wood in which they smoked the pink fish. Smoked fish was a particular favorite of Ronata, who thought that cooking pink fish made it dry and flavorless compared to the moist, fleshy quality it had when raw. Smoking allowed this flavor to be preserved in a portable fashion. For a particular treat, a couple pieces of the smoked meat were rolled in maple sugars that had been stored for the voyage. The candy offered a similar protein-rich travel snack to dried jerky, but with a unique flavor and softer texture.

“It’s too bad we’ll probably be clear of this section of the river before autumn. If we were still here in spawning season, we could take a few pregnant salmon for their caviar.” Ronata mused while chewing a piece of the smoked meat.

Darandar gagged loudly, “I am personally really grateful we will be as far away from fish eggs as we can be.”

“You eat bird eggs!” she retorted.

“That’s like saying since babies drink milk from their mothers, we should just go around sticking our lips under a mother aurochs,” Darandar said, outraged.

“That is not at _all_ the same thing,” Luzacam hollered from the back of the pack, laughter rolling in his speech.

“No, he might have a point,” Kenalal said.

“I wonder what aurochs milk tastes like,” said Nele.

Someone made a sneer of disgust.

A faint hint of early fall was in the air when the group was officially clear of the glacier. As the glacier segment they’d skirted was, for the most part, an icy cap that crushed down a significant portion of the mountains future Europeans would know as the Alps, the group veered a bit further north than they would have strictly needed to in order to keep to the grassy areas of lower elevation, which made for much easier walking. The ancient forests that would one day blanket Germany and Poland had not yet taken root; the traveling party was slipping into a steppe area with fewer trees than the land they’d ventured earlier. Between the permafrost that still took root in a large part of the north, and the drier air caused by so much of the earth’s moisture being trapped in the great ice sheets, the woods did not grow as thick or as tall in much of Europe.

Kenalal, ever-observant, had been monitoring the decent of the sun from day to day. One clear, orange-tinted later summer morning, he spoke to his friends as they packed their gear.

“I think it will soon turn to autumn. The autumn even-day is coming up.”

“Zelandoni told my Mother, on the day I was born, that it was the autumn even-day. So I always count my years when we pass it.” Ronata said. “So I guess I can count twenty years now. Or maybe in a few days.”

“I was born in autumn, too, late autumn. My mother’s mate was quite annoyed that she’d had her baby ahead of schedule, because she couldn’t be very helpful in preparing for winter. I guess that means I’m almost twenty-one.” Darandar added.

“So that means now would be as good a time as any for that pre-winter hunt we’d been thinking of, huh?” Munavan offered.

Kenalal kept looking in the eastern direction of the late-summer sun. “Yes, I agree.”

Ronata had never been to the area, but her sense of direction prevailed. “We have been traveling north for over half a moon. It won’t be long before we turn back to the south to meet with the Losadunai. They live on the Great Mother River, as most people east of here do.”

“We’ll be traveling through some more mountainous areas south of here, but if we keep near the waterways, it won’t be too extreme. We will be making slower pace, though, I’m sure.” Munavan said while hefting on his backframe. “What should we hunt?”

“We are too few to be hunting herd animals this time of year, if you ask me. The best thing to get up north would be rhino, but they’re a risky endeavor. If we are headed south into more mountainous, forested areas like before, I think we should seek out a bear.” Ronata said.

“Rhinos are risky, huh, but not bears?” Darandar said, skeptical.

“Well, bears can kill you twenty times before you even know what’s happening. But they live alone. Herd animals can stampede, and you can’t sneak up on a hundred at once. It would be tough without enough chasers. So I elect bear.” She explained.

There were nods of agreement. “And besides, knowing it’s the autumn even-day, we should have a nice little feast to celebrate. Or we can say we’re celebrating that I can count twenty,” she said with humour.

A few days later, the group set up camp in a south-east directed valley. They would stay here for a few days to rest, hunt, and hopefully, to process a kill. The first day was spent collecting gear and making a hunting plan.

“Chasing a bear is a losing battle. You need to sit idle until they come to you,” Ronata explained. “Yesterday, I left some old fish and fruit in the woods a decent walk from here, and if there are bears around, the smell should get them curious. I set it up in three areas with good tree coverage.”

“So we will pair off, and wait?” Luzacam provided.

“Yes, we should go into the pine branch blinds at first light and sit. It might get a bit boring, but make sure you have very heavy spears. Bears aren’t the best climbers, but don’t be fooled, they will could potentially destroy you even if you’re perched higher in the blind. Don’t let your spear out of your sight; if you put it down, make sure your partner has theirs. Keep a club or axe, too – bears are fat, not always easy to stab. Being able to finish them off with a blow to the head is necessary to make sure they don’t come back to life when you approach them.”

“Do we have good odds, between the three groups?” Nele asked.

“I’m thinking if we don’t have any luck before half-noon, we should go home and try again as the evening light fades. Midday isn’t a good time for hunting anything, generally. At least not anything big.”

The six friends were agitated. They had all hunted many times before, some more often than others. Those who hunted less often generally made an exception for big herd chases, where as many people as possible contributed to taking down bison or reindeer. Others liked leisurely woods forays to see what kind of small game they could find, like jerboas, hamsters, or rabbits, or birds. While rabbit wasn’t quite as tasty as a larger animal, these types of hunts were more relaxed and enjoyable and could be mixed in with foraging. It was less common to hunt larger prey in a smaller group like this, and it would be essential to follow the process carefully.

The next morning, the group crept to their baiting sites while it was still as black as night. In an age before clocks, there was little concept of ‘time’ when the sun went down – the movement of the moon being far more variable than the east-west arc of the always-shining sun. Nonetheless, from the faint tweeting of birds, the hunters knew it was closer to dawn than to sundown by a wide margin.

They tried to make themselves comfortable in makeshift pine branch huts. The thin, densely packed needles made them less visible to their prey, and the strong piney odor, paired with the increasingly putrid fish and fruit mash left as bait, masked the natural body odor of the human hunters. Nele sat with Ronata, Munavan with Luzacam, and Darandar with Kenalal.

There was a serenity to these early morning hunts. It could get boring to sit for so long, but the hunters usually found themselves able to be lulled into a peaceful meditation as the air around them took on the desaturated grey of pre-dawn and their ears became attuned to the tiniest sounds.

Frogs croaked in distant ponds, the delicate wings of bugs hummed in the air, and the tiny scattering of mice and other miniscule denizens of the forest floor joined in to create the minimalist music of an autumn morning. The human hunters waited for the percussion of a heavy animal’s footsteps to join the melody.


	8. Chapter 8

Ronata detected movement to the right side of her periphery. Spear hoisted, she waited unmoving while the crinkling bushes parted. It was surely not a bear. A smaller, greyish-furred creature padded out of the foliage hesitantly, twitching its fluffy head to observe its surroundings with round, golden eyes.   
“Look at those tufts,” Ronata whispered almost inaudibly. The animal’s triangular ears were tipped with dark strands of fur. Paired with the abundant warm-grey hairs on its cheeks, it gave the head an angular contour that distinguished it from other types of cat. “You don’t always see lynx so far down the mountain.”   
“He’s so cute,” Nele said, voice high with restrained glee.   
“His fur is beautiful, so soft-looking.” The European variety of the wildcat had a gold tone to its fur, ranging from a very pale rose gold in its face and chest, to a deeper brassy yellow down the back. It was mottled with black spots; not exaggerated polka dots of the cheetah, but somewhat indistinct, widely-spaced patches. “I’d almost want the pelt, but we can’t eat the meat. I don’t want to ruin our chances with the bear.”   
“No, I’d hate to kill him. He’s too cute.” Nele said with a smile. Ronata nodded in agreement.   
The lynx wandered off. Sometime later, the distinctly gritty throat noises of a bear could be heard. A fat mound of brown fur waddled into the clearing, nosing at the scraps of pungent fish. Brown bears were not as aggressively built as their North American grizzly cousins, who had a threatening look with their bulky, padded shoulders. They were nonetheless incredibly formidable, weighing at least twice as much as a human being and could sometimes measure up to a human shoulder when standing on all fours. This specimen seemed a bit smaller – shorter, but a bit fat, as the bears were earnestly dedicating themselves to their winter bulking season. Probably a female, but Ronata hesitated. She’d rather not kill a female who was teaching young cubs; it would be an unfortunate blow against the children, who might still be nursing or at least still living with their mother. Cubs were plenty good for food, too, but bears often had twins, and three bears would be a lot for six people to process and carry. It would be quite wasteful.   
The bear stuck around the baiting site, massive rump facing the hunters. Ronata gestured to Nele, indicating for her to ready her spear. They waited, bodies and minds tense, for the bear to turn around. They had to hit its centre of mass – a shot to the bottom wouldn’t kill it, and the bear’s thick skull might not be pierced by a spear. Even if it did kill the bear, it would be slow, and she’d possibly run so far in her scared and injured state that the hunters would never find her. She’d be a meal for that lynx they’d seen earlier.   
The bear turned broadside to the hunters’ blind. In a split second, Ronata hoisted her spear and launched, Nele following a second later. In the same moment that the two spears made their arc, the female lifted herself onto her back paws and scraped at a tree. The movement was enough that Ronata’s spear entirely skirted the animal, and Nele’s planted impotently in the lower back.   
The bear grunted in pain. Ronata’s heart immediately flushed with stress. “Oh no,” she rasped. “Get down.” She nudged Nele into a tight crouch, with the pine branches blocking her. With one eye peering a path through the needles, she watched the bear dart into the woods. She was briefly relieved but, thinking of her companions, let out a loud cry of “Watch out!” 

Kenalal and Darandar sat leisurely in their blind, Darandar’s head drooping with boredom.   
“It makes me feel unmanly so I don’t say it often, but Great Earth Mother, I hate hunting. I’m bored. I’m sleepy. And if we get home with a kill, we’ll still have more work to do,” he said.  
“Learn to love the mornings,” Kenalal said, lightly twirling his flint spear point in his fingers, “It’s a beautiful time.”   
“You know when you have too much of Denicol’s drink, and you have to wake up the next day? I feel that every time I’m up before dawn.”   
Kenalal began to chuckle, but he suddenly jolted at the sound of a human yelling. “Spears, grab,” he said, almost incoherently. Darandar grabbed his weapon, and the two stared wide-eyed into their clearing. They heard the crunching and rumbling of a huge animal moving through the brush just out of their field of vision. From the pattern of the pattering, the creature was at a run, not a walk. The two men’s facial expressions read worry, without them needing to say a word. 

Luzacam quickly noticed that the bear who was storming their clearing had a conspicuous spear pointing out of its side. Based on the placement, it was probably jabbing into the animal’s digestive system, but not into the organs that would kill it fast. Well, so much for making waterbags. If an intestine was pierced, gutting the creature would be far more stinky work. He confidently held up his spear and nodded to Munavan, who was quite calm and collected. The bear, grunting in confusion, as if it were trying to scratch an unreachable itch, tumbled around until it snared a paw into a squishy section of moss. This halted the creature long enough for the two men to cast their throws. As the biggest man of the group, Munavan could handle heavier spears than the rest of his party, and his cast landed true into the core of the animal. Luzacam’s landed a heartbeat later. The bear released a fine mist of red in its final breath.   
Nobody moved for a moment, hesitant to approach until they knew there was no danger. Kenalal and Darandar remained still in their blind, hearing echoes of the commotion, and Nele and Ronata hoped their missed shot made the hunt easier, and not more deadly, for their companions. Munavan decided to release a very human, and audibly victorious hoot. The sharp sound disseminated far enough that his companions could hear it, and all made their way to the clearing where he stood beside their prey. 

The benefit in killing an animal that weighed three hundred pounds was that one’s meat and fat needs will be met for a good, long time. The problem with killing an animal that weighed three hundred pounds was that one would now have an enormous mass of dead weight that was cumbersome to move. The crew gutted the bear in the field, its shiny, red organs just as strong-smelling and gamey as they’d predicted. While prehistoric humans, who processed their own meat all the time, had much stronger stomachs regarding the more repulsive elements of the work, particularly strong, putrid odors could still be somewhat nauseating. They debated breaking the animal into pieces to carry home, but Munavan ultimately suggested they should make a sort of litter to carry it from sticks that could be slung over their shoulders with the kill swinging beneath. The removal of organs – abandoning all but the liver in the field - made the animal a bit lighter, but it was still a trudge to carry it back to camp, and the traveling party ended up being very grateful that the extra days spent processing this kill would keep their aching bodies from needing to take up their backframes again for a few days.   
The bear’s big rump offered a huge store of white fat. It was immediately set to melt over a fire so that impurities like hair and cartilage could be removed. It had a strong, meaty taste relative to some of the more neutral fats one could get from an herbivore, but it would be useful for lighting lamps, lubricating tools, and adding richness to certain foods. Once it was clean and white, it would be funneled into the intestines of a smaller animal from an earlier hunt, forming little convenient sausages of pure grease.   
The meat was divided into many sections, the choicest selected for that night’s evening meal. The hindquarters were set out for processing, a few pieces pressed between cool rocks to keep them better-preserved and other pieces strung over fires to discourage bugs. A few bones were kept for marrow, with the rest also laid out to dry, as the thick, sturdy bones of such a heavy creature could have numerous uses for scrapers and crushers of all kinds. Smaller pieces of bone could even be used to fuel fires, as they burned hotter than wood. Luzacam kept a few of the nicely-shaped pieces for his carving. The hide was set out to smoke, and Darandar volunteered to scrape away its tissue to make it ready for winter wear. Between that and the insulating reindeer hides they’d collected while still on the northern plains, they’d be somewhat prepared for when the weather turned, though they’d been planning to be safely with the Losadunai by then.   
They left a big haunch of bear meat cooking in a fire pit, with side dishes of blueberries and roots collected from the ground beside their campsite ordered out for quick cooking. It was late afternoon when the six friends looked upon their work, satisfied with the progress.   
Luzacam rubbed together his fingers, producing grimy, brownish dust. His arms were brown and red almost to the elbows, and he had stiff, brown bear hairs clinging to them. His hair was in disarray, his beard had clumps of leaf and more bear hair, and some parts of him even felt greasy with bear fat. On top of that, his tunic was discolored, sweaty, and a little bloody. He looked no different than the other five members of his group.   
The river near their campsite was partially fed by the glacial streams coming down from the mountains, and while it made for great drinking, it was a bit frigid for bathing. Nonetheless, the later afternoon had allowed the water to be maximally tempered by the sun, and the travelers realized a little coldness would be worth the cleanliness. They all wadded into the water, fully clothed at first, washing the grime off their tunics and bodies all at once. They separated a little and removed their clothing in the water, grinding the garments in their hands with pounded soapweeds, and cleaning their bodies, too. With gasping breaths, they sunk their heads under the chilly water to clean their hair – short work for Kenalal and Darandar, who preferred to keep their hair short, but a bigger task for Munavan and Luzacam, who usually kept their hair in a sort of topknot on their journey. Nele and Ronata, who both kept their hair braided when traveling, had hair down past their waists when unwoven, and a good wash was welcome. Nele was a bit timid and paddled further upstream before bathing herself. Incidental witnessing of another’s nudity was common for a people who lived in such close quarters and who traveled together, but when bathing they separated just enough to give a pretense of privacy. They wrapped themselves in warm, soft goat skin upon exiting the water, and laid out on the sun-warmed rocks, laying out their clothes and spreading out their hair to dry. Nele timidly toddled back to where her friends lie, with her drying chamois skin hiked up to her chest. Ronata, so flat-breasted that they vanished into the landscape of her ribcage when she laid back, brazenly lacked such shyness.   
“I’m tired of talking about hunts. Tell us a story, Munavan.” Ronata said, still on her back and staring at the lightly clouded sky.   
“Like, a legend or a personal story?” Nele interjected.  
“Personal, obviously. You haven’t known him as long as I have, but he gets up to no good all the time, especially when we were younger.” Ronata said with a laugh.  
“Okay,” Munavan said, cracking his knuckles. “This is a good one. So at the summer meeting, maybe five years ago, I was walking with Jeridam – you remember him, right?”   
Some stayed silent, but most met the name with a groan. “He’s one of the only men I’ve ever met who bothered me repeatedly to share pleasures. Most don’t even bother with me unless I start things.” Ronata said, rolling her eyes.  
“Yeah he does that to anybody. Anyway, so we were walking on the camp edges, and we found this piece of ivory in a puddle. We were like, laughing, saying, look at that, doesn’t it look like a guy’s manhood? I tapped it with my toe and it rolled out of the puddle. I said, hold on, this is way too accurate to be an accident. Pick it up, I told him. Jeridam picked it up and we got a good look at it. Yeah, it was definitely carved with a purpose. I mean, we give Donii figures big old breasts and sometimes a visible vulva, but we don’t do it to be seductive. That’s just how we make images of the Mother. And they don’t quite look like normal human women, anyway. This was totally a man’s organ. It was…detailed. It even had the little sack at the base. Why did someone make this? Someone made this for a reason. We’d never seen anything like it.”  
The companions were intrigued by the tale, but Luzacam and Ronata chuckled, as they knew this story extremely well.   
“Well we decided this thing was definitely going to be a prime source of comedy for that meeting. We’d cinch it against our waist belts and strike up conversations with people, and just wait until they noticed our big white organs flying loose. We played catch with it, too, and we teased a few people headed to their matrimonials with it. It’s too bad I was a bit young then, because if I’d known more people mating – well, there was untapped potential. Only one guy gave us grief. This big guy, a bit older, from a cave way to the north – low-ranked cave, too, by the way. Tabodam was his name. Anyway he wasn’t just teasing us, he was being legitimately threatening, acting like we were trying to force his mate. By the way, I don’t think we once even saw his mate. So that was entire conjecture for him. Eventually we’d run our humor dry from the ivory organ, so we decided to get rid of it in a fitting way. We left it in front of Tabatod’s tent. His cave’s Zelandoni confronted us about it, saying it was interpreted as threatening. Again. Threatening. I don’t see how a manhood is threatening. Anyway, Jeridam got us out of that one in his typical sly ways: he said, ‘This man was making fun of me for sharing pleasures with a man, and gave me the ivory as a taunt. I am returning it to him.’ Maybe it’s because we were younger, but Zelandoni believed him. And we got off without any troubles.” Munavan laughed at the memory. “I’m pretty sure he never shared pleasures with a man. I don’t think it interested him. Jeridam was a liar and in many ways a terrible person, but sometimes I miss him, and all that we got into.”  
“Whatever happened to Jeridam, anyay? I sort of remember him,” asked Kenalal.  
“Oh he’s good and dead!” Munavan announced with an odd level of enthusiasm.  
“Wait, what? How?”   
“Oh he absolutely brought it upon himself. Took some ‘spirit journey plants’ when totally unsupervised, ran into the woods, and didn’t come back out. He was found after a couple days, gored by the horns of a bison. Like, who could do something so foolish?”  
“Now I really thought he’d just gone on a journey. That was what some of us were told.” Kenalal said.  
“Yes, his cave had more kin with ours, and there was a bit of a cover-up because it makes the Zelandonia look bad if their special plants make people that dumb. What they don’t realize is the plants didn’t make him dumb, he was dumb. Clever but dumb.”   
“Well that took a dark turn. Which is too bad, because the ivory organ story was really funny.” Darandar said.   
The group allowed themselves a good laugh despite the uncomfortable shadow cast by the talk of death.   
The sun was on its way down when the cooking pit that housed the bear meat was finally opened with a surge of fragrant, savory steam. Much of the fat had melted off, and a bit of it was used to drizzle the starchy roots, that were roasted and sprinkled with herbs. It was served with a medley of green vegetables intermixed with a few fresh blueberries – evoking Ronata’s statement that animals are best served with the food they liked to eat when alive. They also each took a ceremonial sliver of the bear liver – only a small piece, as the liver of bear could be toxic when consumed in large quantities. The party ate ravenously, having had very little chance to snack throughout their busy day. Their meal was topped off with more of the fresh, fat purple fruits. There would be ample leftovers, and while savouring their hard-earned meal, the party settled on their decision to spend seven days at their camp, continuing to process their kill and taking stock of their needs for the rest of the journey. After that – and a bit of relaxation, too – they would begin the part of their journey that took them through the valley, and would end with a safe haven with the Losadunai.


	9. Chapter 9

The next leg of their journey was the most challenging. Avoiding the glacier demanded that the effort be distributed among several weeks of walking in the varied elevation of the lower mountains. The mountains were chillier than the plains and forests below, and rocky, so their footwork was not as easy and absent-minded. The travelers would get a bit disoriented by staring at their feet for long stretches of careful walking, only realizing upon looking up how far, or how little, they’d traveled. On the positive side, the more mountainous area offered enchanting views that fueled the zeal for travel, and the varied plant life on the mountain ridges offered some good collecting for travel fuel. There were shallow-buried onions, so pungent they could be detected by scent, and many buttery, rich flowers and honey-tasting thistles. The travelers enjoyed the autumn bounty as the days grew shorter.

Circadian rhythms lagged a little behind the tilt of the earth, and after many days in the valley, Ronata noticed she began to wake while it was still rather dark; at first, she enjoyed the extra time in the morning, putting little touches on projects while her friends slowly came to life. One morning, however, she unlatched the tent to find the dewy mountain grass glazed with patches of frost. In the bruised dawn sky, she could still see the moon – the barest sliver bigger than a half-moon. Had it really been over a moon since the autumn even-day? She heated up some cooking stones for a pot of lemon balm and rose hip tea, sipping more for the warmth than for the flavor. She imagined her companions would appreciate it.

“Munavan, I’m serious,” Kenalal pleaded, one afternoon a few days later. “Look at your footwear. It’s falling apart at the seams. Darandar is practically walking barefoot.”

While venturing north of the glacier saved the travelers a dangerous five or six days on the glacier itself, the long course they’d chosen was not without its faults. The woods they’d indulged in further down gave way to jagged outcroppings of stone on acidic, mountainous soil. The uneven terrain greatly delayed their journey, and what should have been a straight line was often veered off-course by gorges or other difficult obstacles that needed to be sidestepped. Worst of all, as Kenalal noted, the mealy pebbles of the ground wore away at their leather shoes like sandpaper, and in the cooling autumn days, they had no choice but to stop for refurbishing.

Nele pulled a leather boot, worn gossamer thin, off her foot. The bottoms of her heels were harder than the bottom of her shoes had been. The others were similarly relieved to be free-footed, even in the cooler weather. They’d found a notch in the side of a steep wall, not quite a cave, but a bit of protection. They’d probably stay two days – enough to rest their aching feet and rebuild their footwear, but not enough to grow indolent from a break in exercise. Some of what they had for footwear could be salvaged – the softer leather pocket that made up the bulk of the shoe could be refitted, and the leather thongs that served as laces could be pulled out and woven into the new builds. Darandar, for one, was essentially walking with bags loosely fitted over his feet, and would take a little more work to repair.

Munavan wet a leather hide. When processing leather for clothing, they avoided wetting it to keep it supple, but for their purposes, they’d want some stiff layers. Luzacam and Ronata went to gather some grasses, blown dry and hay-like from the downslope wind. The rest looked over their shoes to discern what could be reused, and collected the thongs and leather in two piles. With the large leather hide still damp, they had achieved all they could for the day, and the six shared a meal of soup made with dried meat and assorted vegetables and fruits they’d collected. The flavor was odd, but as the mountain winds grew harsher by evening, it warmed them from the inside.

The next day, each person traced the contour of their foot in the stiff leather. Then they worked in assembly-line fashion to layer two segments of stiffened, wet leather in a sandwich of insulating grass, using a piercing awl to create holes, and lacing the sole to a softer leather foot-pouch. They reinforced the toes, wove thongs on the top for laces, and tried them on. Though they’d finished the work rather quickly, they elected not to travel that day, as their mini-cave made a stable shelter.

Their journey resumed with several consecutive days of alternating drizzle and overcast days. For four days in a row, the sky was as dense as a silty river, and the group, who’d grown accustomed to breathtaking panoramas, could barely see far enough through the fog to know where they’d be by the end of an afternoon, let alone the next day.

“I think we are getting blown off-course,” Luzacam said, feigning an attempt to find the sun behind the dense broth of fog.

Munavan, ever-ready to take charge, spoke next: “We need to follow the valley. It goes diagonally, south-east. It will let out a little above the river.”

“Yes, but we haven’t been so strict in following it, have we? We reach a boulder, we go around. How far off-course did that take us?” said Luzacam.

“Well when we _can_ see the sun, we have been going against its path. That’s east, I think we’d know if we went too far.” Munavan said, as Luzacam hurried a bit to be nearer to him in the pack.

“Nobody in this group has made this journey before, so we are going in blindly.”

“Don’t worry about it. When we get to the river, we’ll know. The most important thing is having something to follow.”

“It’s important to have something to follow, huh?” Luzacam said, with a bit of sarcasm.

“Why am I the one who always has to make decisions here? We’re six grown adults and I sometimes feel like I’m leading you around like a grandma mammoth with a bunch of babies.”

Luzacam furrowed his brow. “Don’t act like you hate making decisions. You are thrilled we don’t question it that you want to play leader, admit it.”

Munavan looked back upon his crew. Nele was giggling talking to the superficially stoic Kenalal, and Darandar and Ronata were chatting quietly, though as soon as Munavan looked back, the later made eye contact with him. She gave a little nod. He said nothing.

When the group took a break to refill their drinking bags from a skinny mountain waterfall, Ronata approached Munavan. “Are you getting into it with Luzacam?” she said.

“No, he has a point, but it just feels dramatic coming from him.”

The two conversed slightly apart from the party, back facing them. “I can’t see the sun or the moon in all this fog, but I can tell that time is passing. I’ve been counting the days on a piece of bear bone. The autumn even-day,” she took a breath, “Mune, that was forty-one days ago. How did so much time pass? Winter will be coming on hard in a moon. Kenalal agrees with me – he notices things, like a frosty smell in the air. We assumed it was because we were high in the mountains, but we’re going lower and it isn’t changing.”

Munavan always made a show of mocking his friend, but he did respect her opinion. She had a pragmatic and honest nature that he teased, but that proved to be of great value. Luzacam was dramatic, and Kenalal was impassive. Nele and Darandar were mentally quite childlike, at times. Ronata was the one who could give honest advice and would express equal honesty when she had no advice to give; and her frankness had earned her the role of his prime confidante in the same implicit, unspoken way that he was often treated as a leader. “Are the rest worried yet?”

“Nele worries about everything. Kenalal also worries about everything, but doesn’t show it, and Darandar, well who knows what he thinks. He’s always got a distant look in his eyes… I, personally, am not worried yet, but we’ve gone from a leisurely trail-trip to a journey with purpose.”

“We can only hope the fog lets up soon,” he said.

Ronata glanced back at her traveling companions. “Can I suggest something without sounding ridiculous?”

“You’ll sound ridiculous regardless,” he said.

“I’m going to…meditate, I guess, and try to picture our surroundings. I have a good sense of direction, you know. I feel like there’s a map in my mind, like if I were a bird above the land.”

“That’s pretty absurd,” he said, but her face tightened into an unimpressed grimace. “But if it helps, have at it.”

Munavan was pensive for the rest of the afternoon, walking alone at the head of the pack. He’d always been unafraid to call the shots, both with friends and with work projects. He enjoyed the prestige it brought him; it had gained him a bit of status despite coming from a family of little status and still being unmated and without children. It never occurred to him that he would be wrong – it was not simple arrogance, but a forced self-assurance he’d needed to build his own confidence. If sometimes he’d tangle with a friend over a difference of opinion, he could tend to attack with more intensity than a friendly debate demanded, because he’d cultivated so much of his identity on his own self-assurance. _Well, usually I actually am right_ , he thought to himself. And it was true – he had measured and rational decision-making skills. He’d never been a true leader, though. He’d directed some work building boats or huts, sure, but that was directing a single project, with others with equal expertise. Now the stakes were higher, and in matters of long-distance traveling, he knew no more than his companions. He’d considered himself ready to face the challenge of leading a travel, but was he really ready to face the guilt and the anxiety of leading his friends astray?

When evening began to fall and the party had set camp in other small cave, Ronata wrapped herself up in her sleeping furs and sat on a rock. Blanketed in the fur and the milky fog, she felt enclosed, almost swimming in the air. She closed her eyes and worked her brain to trace back the path they’d followed the past two moons. Indeed, she felt a bit like an eagle soaring over the land, but with a far less romantic image – it was more like she was staring at a realistic but blurry map. _North, north, north, east, south, bear hunt, south, east, southeast…._ Snapshots of the travel flowed liquid in her mind. _We made a wider angle than we had to in the north steppe. We veered wide. That’s why. I think that’s why._ She recalled the flattening terrain of the past few days. The fog is disconcerting, and they did travel in a wider arc than necessary, but they aren’t so far from where they should be. They are not _so_ far. If they continue south – sharper south – they may be able to somewhat make up for lost time. The ground was flattening, too, and they could travel more quickly that way. Warmed internally by relief, she realized the cold bit her skin. She realized nothing more could be gained outside on this rock. Ronata crawled into the cave, still wrapped in her furs, and slipped cozily between Darandar and Nele. They all slept late.

The morning dawned clear for once. The sky was a bright cerulean and the sun a blinding orb in the direction of their destination. The ground was covered in a blanket of glimmering white.

“We really lost track of time, didn’t we?” Darandar said, hair in disarray, with his sleeping furs wrapped around him like a cape. He looked out of the cave’s mouth, squinting. The sun, missing for so many days, reflected off the newly white ground with an intensity that stung his grey-blue eyes.

Kenalal appeared beside him, tying the thongs on his tunic. “I thought I could feel frost in the air, but that’s normal in autumn. Ronata’s been cutting the days into a piece of bone. It’s still so early for snow.” Kenalal, always impassive, showed a notable hint of concern in his voice. “I’m sure it’s early for snow.”

“Well, we’re in the mountains, aren’t we? By the glacier? Maybe it’s normal over here.” Darandar soothed.

Kenalal, brown eyes wide and brow clenched, rationalized: “Early snow doesn’t stay long. I’m sure it’s nothing. It’s just unexpected.”

The repacked their backframes and set out again.


	10. Chapter 10

The wind blew tiny, sharp needles of icy dust into the faces of the six travelers. Kenalal was right that early snows didn’t forbear more snows right away, but he was wrong about it not staying long. It seemed as though the individual snowflakes that had fallen on that clear morning didn’t melt, and instead hardened like dried sinew into stiff little pellets, which became buckshot on every gust of wind. The group had not packed significant winter wear – having only what they’d worked from their early autumn bear kill. Their new footwear, stuffed with grass, kept their toes from going numb, but they soon found themselves consistently traveling with their sleeping furs wrapped around them like sleeveless coats. Surely, at a distance, they looked like a herd of musk oxen on the move.

Their traveling pattern was reversed relative to how they’d journeyed in the summer – instead of taking advantage of the cool mornings and stopping leisurely for lunch, the group found themselves slow to start in the morning. Kenalal, as the biggest tea enthusiast of the group, felt almost as if he was fueling his companions with their lifeblood – they were pale, blue entities brought back to life from the warming touch of tea on their lips. Nele was still the quickest of the bunch to start a fire despite the ice that she felt in her fingers. She scraped flint against stone into a tinder of dry moss to start a tough little fire on a slate. Kenalal’s fingers fidgeted too, as he clumsily grabbed smooth cooking stones with tongs to plop in a skin pot. He was less dexterous in the cold and grew frustrated every time he’d let a stone skid away. He’d almost had the urge to grab the scalding rocks with his bare hands – not like he’d feel the fury of the burn in his increasingly numb fingertips. He sprinkled little daisy-like flowers into the hot water, the warm brightness of their yellow centers seeming like a mockery of the grey and frigid evening. By the end of a few days, the whole group disdained the taste of chamomile, considering it more like a medicine against cold than a tea taken for tea’s sake.

The days alternated between sunny and grey, and on one of the sunnier days Kenalal suddenly remarked how flattened the land had become. His attention to detail had surely faltered in his melancholy of the cold. He’d scarcely noticed how long it had been since cliffs stood imposingly around his traveling party.

The group had a reprieve from wind and renewed hope when they crested a steep before their lunch break one day, and saw the Great Mother River flowing proudly before them.

“So how far to the Losadunai?” Darandar said with tepid enthusiasm.

Munavan stood on an outcropping and looked around. He hesitated.

“Well, first thing’s first. It’s too steep to get down this way,” he deflected, “So we’ll need to find a smoother place.”

Kenalal followed him up to the outcropping and looked around. The most well-known feature of the Losadunai people were their hot springs – every traveler who’d gone that way brought tales of great, odd-scented baths that were like the water of the womb; so close to human body temperature that a person felt as though they were floating, untouched, like a baby sheltered inside its mother. Hot tubs of water lying in open, autumn air would surely produce steam visible from afar, but no such feature was visible in the panorama Kenalal saw before him. He concluded – though he’d concluded this many times before – that they were off course. The question was then in which direction and by how much? He glanced to Munavan, waiting for the defacto alpha to instruct his pack. 

Munavan turned around, and avoided looking at Luzacam for a moment.

“We’re too far to see them now. I will suggest we find a way down the slope and follow the river until we find the settlement. It can’t be that far.”

Luzacam threw up his arms. “I knew it!”

Munavan frowned. “Why would you gloat about something that inconveniences you, too?”

“Alright, so how do we know which was to go when we reach the river?” Darandar asked, diverting from the brewing discontent between Luzacam and Munavan.

“Let’s riddle this out for a second,” Ronata said, kneeling on the ground. She pulled out a roll of birch bark with somewhat esoteric symbols. “The Great Mother River essentially starts _under_ the glacier, or inside it.” She pointed at a blob on her drawing. “It’s somewhat straight east, gently north, until it starts to curve more sharply north.” She pointed at an unmarked section, that hadn’t been visited. She pulled out a charred stick from her pouch and made a triangle around the area where the river veered north. “We have to assume we overshot the Losadunai, because since we went north of the glacier, we couldn’t follow the path of the River in a straight line, right?”

Some of the travelers were a bit perplexed. To a people with no written language, their minds had been well-accustomed to abstraction, but the intersection of the abstract and the tangible in the form of symbolic representation was somewhat baffling. Luzacam, as a carver, better understood artistic representation, so he caught on quickly.

“So we meet the river, backtrack beside the river going southwest, and we’ll find them,” he said.

“Exactly.”

“I almost wish we could just bypass them and go straight on to the S’Armunai,” Nele said, “But it will be the dead of winter if we tried to go that far.”

“Oh, it would surely kill us. We aren’t ready to go that far in the winter.” Kenalal agreed.

The travelers ended up not needing to backtrack quite as far along the river as they’d initially predicted. A great deal of the backtracking took place before they’d ever found their way down the ridge. There were areas, now and again, that could have been scaled with adept feet, but burdened with their gear and still often draped in their sleeping furs, the group wasn’t in the mood for feats of acrobatics.

The finally reached the bottom a short jaunt from the shore. They traveled along the edge of the mother river for an entire day, less chilly on the lowlands than in the mountains. As the setting sun reddened the skies, Kenalal was the first to notice the translucent distortion of far-off steam.

The group made camp jovially in the evening, having a relatively large feast of assorted items they’d collected. Hopefully, it would be their last dinner on the road. They pitched a single, large tent in the shelter of a few pine trees, and settled down with quiet anticipation.

Nele woke up with a jolt. The ceiling above her was moving. She groped for Ronata, initially more for security than to wake her. She turned back onto her side, bunching up a piece of hide against her belly as she curled tighter. Usually a deep sleeper, her eyes wouldn’t stay shut. She turned over again, almost afraid of something unseen. She held her breath and saw a flash. She took in more air, sharply and suddenly, as thunder rolled on. There’d been rain before, on their travels. The hide stayed firm. Their fire would be dead and the wood soaked, but they could skip out on the tea in the morning. It was safe.

The ceiling of the tent agitated again, and drops of heavy, icy rain slammed against it as the wind thrashed the pine branched. The skin of the tent rippled and dimpled like a hundred prying fingers were trying to get in. Another flash, another rumble, and Nele grabbed at Ronata again, who groaned and slowly roused.

One more flash, one more rumble, and a surge of water rushed forth from the collapsing tent roof, soaking Nele and all her travelling companions. Darandar jolted forward with an offended shriek, and Ronata groped around in clumsy grogginess, suddenly aware her thick braids were heavy with icy water.

Kenalal, immediately alert, crawled out of the tent. Munavan followed him closely. They looked at the tent, crushed and soggy, gouged open by a fallen pine branch. It was being filled like a waterbag from an aggressive little waterfall that had suddenly appeared in the short cliff they’d considered shelter. The other four were scrambling to get their belongings out of the tent before they soaked through. The wind raced against the cliffs, sending near-frozen droplets of water sideways into the two men. They had to raise their voices to be heard over the wind.

“What should we do?” Kenalal bellowed.

“We can’t get the tent back up! Look at it, it’s soaked, and torn, and it’s pitch dark and we can barely see what we’re doing!” Munavan said, restraining panic in his voice.

Nele was crouched on the ground, pathetically trying to light a torch in the driving rain, sheltering the sparks with her own increasingly waterlogged body. Nearby, Luzacam, Ronata, and Darandar were stuffing as much as they could into their bags, which had been hung from short trees to keep them from getting wet on the ground. Munavan would almost laugh from the irony if his brain was not caught up calculating the next move.

“We go. We go now.” He suddenly announced.

“It’s the middle of the night!” Kenalal said, eyes scanning the sky for any sign of morning. He couldn’t tell – there was light from thunderclouds, but the heavy, vicious clouds hid the moon and the stars.

“And when morning comes, will we be any less wet?” Munavan shot back.

Kenalal gave him a look of understanding. They rushed to the aid of their friends and packed their possessions. In the frantic scramble, most people ended up with someone else’s things in their pack, and some people even wound up wearing someone else’s clothes.

They hurried. The lightning did stop, but the sky never got any clearer nor any lighter; it was an endless torrent in an endless night. The only thing indicating the passage of time for Nele was her recognition that her dark ringlets were freezing into icicles, dangling from her head. She couldn’t feel her ears. Even the sleeping furs did nothing; the long hairs began to stiffen with frost. Her jaw tightened in uncontrollable chatters.

Luzacam twitched his fingers impulsively every few seconds, to assure himself they were still there and they still moved. His breath made frost in his beard, the icy rain pummeled it away, and the frost built up again. Soon, all six were at a barely sustainable jog. The warmth their bodies made from exertion was stolen, degree by degree, by gusting winds.

Kenalal lifted his head – he hadn’t realized til ice cracked at the hair of his nape how long he’d kept it down- and like a vision, he saw the faintest outline of a settlement, only a few faint smatterings of orange fire lined with wisps of smoke, barely a contrast against the dark-grey stormy sky.

“We have to cross the river,” he shouted to Munavan. “This is where we must cross.” 

Munavan scanned the area, drowsy and cold. If they’d had time to prepare, they’d have built a raft here, and had a lazy, comfortable crossing like they had before the glacier. The memory of the moment came back in dreamy flashes. But they were soaked. They were frozen. _How bad could it be to cross on foot? Everything is wet anyway. It’s low-depth here, up to our chests, maybe. The Great Mother isn’t very deep at its start._ He realized the faintest morning light was streaming from ahead, and the outline of the settlement became somewhat visible; a beacon, a target. So close. _Everything is already wet, anyway._

He directed the party into the water, and they felt no more frozen when submerged in the water than they did outside of it. Nele held back the impulse to gasp when the water rose almost to her head. She her pack became heavy in the water, but she couldn’t lose it – she had items of value, items to trade. She needed it to meet the Losadunai. Her shoes were soaked through and her numb feet could barely navigate the invisible, uneven rocks beneath the water. The current, often lazy, was stronger in the storm, and it knocked her off her feet over and over. Her friends struggled similarly, many with uncontrollably chattering jaws

A gust of wind came with a matching gust of icy pinpricks to her face. She kept her pack held tight to her body, but she succumbed. The current, feeling so manageable at the start, dragged her away before she could even think of righting herself. The black sky moved ahead of her without her cooperation. Just when she felt so weary of fighting that she almost wanted to just let the current choose her fate for her, she felt a stone scrape against her tingling calf. She supposed it would have hurt, if she could still feel her extremities. She regained a little of her footing – just enough to right herself. Just enough to stumble until the water was to her hips, then to her knees.

She dragged herself to the edge of the Great Mother, frigid and heaving. She couldn’t see; she wasn’t sure if it was the pain of icy rain hitting her eyes, or if her eyelashes had become laden and too heavy to lift. She wasn’t shivering anymore, but she wasn’t warm. She wasn’t aware of being anywhere, and only vaguely recognized the feeling of Darandar putting cold, drenched arms around her frozen body.


	11. Chapter 11

Darandar stirred and squinted in the dim yellow light. The air felt heavy and moist around him. _Well, this is it. I’m walking the next world. That’s a shame,_ he thought, alarmingly accepting of his fate. _Or I’m lying in the next world, rather._

A soft, fluffy hide was drawn up to his neck. It felt luxurious against his bare skin, especially after about three moons of sleeping on the ground in a hastily-pitched tent. He wasn’t on a bed, exactly, but it was a bench raised off the ground, padded with soft grasses and felt. He craned his neck to get a look at his surroundings. It was dim, there was a roof over his head, and that big mass covered by another blanket must be Munavan. _Wait, is my spirit experiencing my body being prepared for burial?_

“You are alive,” said a voice, almost reading his mind. Darandar lifted his head, looking around, and a tall, blond man hurried to his bedside, stuffing a cushion behind his head.

“Oh, thanks,” Darandar said lamely.

“Water?” the man offered. His hair was hay-yellow and tightly coiled like mouflon wool. A friendly, disarming smile split across his face.

Darandar drank eagerly, surprised that he was so thirsty after spending his morning waterlogged. The memory came back to him.

“So, uh, what happened?” he started casually, before a look of terror shot through his eyes, “And my friends! My friends are okay? I was with, with,” he babbled, “There were five, well six, but I’m six, there was a man with a beard and, he had hair, well of course he had hair. There was a tall guy, dark eyes, dark hair, big fat guy, and two girls, well, they weren’t, well they _were_ girls, but like, not girl-as-in-child, they…” Darandar took a deep breath. The man stared at him blankly.

“We found six persons on watersedge. They live, they are all here with you,” he gestured around. “Braided-hair woman, name is Ronata, she stands, and brown-eyed man, name is Kenalal, he stands.” He hesitated, and corrected himself. “He is awake. They are awake.”

It hadn’t been obvious from the first few words, but Darandar noticed that he spoke with an accent. The clipped schwa-sounds on his vowels were stretched out and he combined words in strange portmanteaus. It seemed he had a good grasp of Zelandonii; more than enough to communicate.

“You have laid for the morning. My mate tends to your friends, as well. You were found before dawn. If you feel good, you can lunch with us. It has been long since I spoke Zelandonii, I would practice.”

Darandar, suddenly noticing the emptiness in his stomach, took on an abrupt eagerness to rise out of his sleeping place. He jerked upwards and threw aside his blanket. In an instant, two things occurred to him: the sudden rise made him woozy, and he was fully naked, flashing his entire body to the unfamiliar man. In just as rapid a movement, he replaced his blanket and laid back down.

The blond man stifled a laugh. “Clothes are drying on rocks. We removed them to make you less cold, when we brought you in. Lisonia will bring you spare clothes of ours if you wish to join us for meal.”

Darandar stared back up at the roof of the large dome in which he’d been sleeping. He turned towards the man and noticed a pool of steaming water behind him, in the center of the dome. He lifted his arms tentatively out of his blanket, making an inhibited rendition of a greeting gesture.

“Darandar of the seventeenth cave of the Zelandonii. Son of Dalorna, born to the hearth of Martenal.”

The blond man held out his hands.

“I am Vodari, acolyte to Losaduna. In the name of the Great Earth Mother, I welcome you to the Territory of the Losadunai.”

Of all the people who could have woken up at the same time as her, Ronata was almost a bit annoyed it had been Kenalal. Of course, she cared about him just about as much as her other traveling companions, but she had less one-on-one time with him than anyone else in her group, and in interacting with him, she’d generally fall back on teasing and ribbing the outwardly serious man. Now, in a tenser situation, she wasn’t sure what to say, and the two looked awkwardly at each other, bundled in blankets, while sitting in the large Losadunai gathering tent.

Ronata and Kenalal were likely the most observant members of their traveling party, but their methods of drawing up their information were quite different. Kenalal watched a young woman with light copper hair weave in and out of the tent, chattering to others in the tent, including an older man with many layers of amulets and necklaces draped around his neck. Kenalal estimated this was their magic man, which, based on the name of the people, was called their Losaduna. The woman reported to him, and left again. He determined from her relationship to the older people that she may be an acolyte, and was probably in charge of keeping watch over Kenalal’s recovering friends. He watched her face closely for signs of distress, and was soothed to see a generally calm and practical demeanor. That meant his friends were probably recovering well.

Ronata did take note of the physical attributes of her surroundings, but she was more interested in listening. It was very clear to her that the Losadunai language was similar to Zelandonii, and as she listened to the unfamiliar people speak, a fog of incomprehension gradually cleared away. Many of the words in Losadunai were nearly identical to their Zelandonii equivalent, but it was initially difficult to discern because their employed a musical second-syllable stress, in contrast to the initial-syllable stress often found in Zelandonii. The vowel sounds also had a wider quality about them, which became very clear in their introductions. _Kenalal,_ her friend had said, pointing at himself. He received an echo of _Kay-NA-lal,_ stretching the short e sound.

The supposed Losaduna got up and left the tent. Kenalal nudged Ronata as soon as he left. “I don’t think we need to worry about that. The woman looks content, or at least calm. And everyone was in there sleeping when I left; nobody had healers working on them. I think we just got too cold, and needed a rest.” He spoke to reassure himself even more than to reassure her.

“They will come back with a few of our people,” she said, certainty in her voice.

“How do you know?”

“I heard the words, ‘they are awake’, but they didn’t say names.”

Kenalal’s face conveyed that he was quite impressed, yet perplexed. “You already know Losadunai?”

“Listen closely, you can tell their language is like ours, but the emphasis is all wrong. Do you remember, how they called you Kaynahlal?”

“Yes, I did notice that.”

“And Munavan said he had a friend here, no doubt they speak Zelandoni, at least a little. We can get the scoop from them. Honestly I am relieved to finally hear spoken Losadunai. I was worried winter would be very awkward if we needed to stay here without knowing what anybody was saying.”

The supposed Losaduna returned to the tent with the orange-haired woman and the blond man in tow. Darandar scooted behind them, followed by Munavan, wearing a comically snug tunic of Losadunai style.

Ronata was nervous to make a mistake, but wanted to leave a good impression on their hosts. She spoke:

“Thankyou for help us in river cross. On behalf of six Zelandoni persons.” She pronounced the name of her people in an exaggeratedly staggered way, as if to say “Zell-AND-Doni.” The blond man chuckled and spoke Zelandoni.

“Ronata, I greet you. I see you have learned some of our language, which is great to hear. I am Vodari, acolyte of Losaduna,” he gestured towards the older man and confirmed Kenalal’s supposition that he was their shaman. “This is my mate, Lisonia. And around the tent we’ve got Matari, Kosani, and uh, turn around for a moment at the fire? Oh, Tifozia. It is too bad we did not get a more formal welcome, but there were more pressing issues.”

Munavan grinned widely, “Luzacam and I met Vodari on a hunt years ago, when he was just talking about wanting to be an acolyte. He really could go on and on about the ceremonial herbs! I loved that about him. It’s nice to see he really made it.”

Vodari, and the copper-haired woman he called Lisonia, made simultaneous grimaces at Munavan’s brashness.

“In the name of the Mother, I greet you, Vodari, and I apologize to start with prying questions, but can you tell us exactly what happened? My memories are spotty. And Nele, and Luzacam, are they okay?” 

“No problem. This morning we had a hunting party preparing for a late-autumn hunt. They were thinking of canceling from rain that fallen in nighttime,” Vodari’s grasp of Zelandoni was very good other than the quirk of unusual word-combining that held over from his language. “They went out nonetheless, and at riveredge they found you persons, wet and cold. You all lie on the ground, packs on your backs, and they worry you were all dead. Matari runs home fast and gets more people to help. We carry you to a steam-lodge and warm you up. Some people like to take baths in the steam lodge when they are cold, but with some of you barely conscious, we knew you could burn or drown if we just threw you in! So in the steam with blankets, you warmed quickly, some quicker than most. Munavan, you were stood,” he corrected himself again, “you were awake when we came to you and you rambled, begging to help your friends, and you recognized me and hugged me hard.” Vodari smiled coyly, and Ronata smirked too at the idea of her bull-headed friend getting so emotional about his companions.

Vodari continued: “Some of you walked, some of you needed to be carried. The tall woman was the weakest of your group; she did not wake at all when we brought you in.” Ronata was stricken as her smirk suddenly disappeared. Nele didn’t rouse at all? “We found her with Ronata and Darandar holding onto her, and I think it kept her warm enough to survive. But I do fear her spirit is still wandering.” He glanced at Losaduna, and spoke in their language to confirm that the spiritual explanation would be useful. “When people are badly hurt, their spirits sometimes leave their bodies temporarily, like a middleway between when they walk-in-dream and when they are dead. It sometimes takes time for them to get comfortable in their bodies again. But we looked at her fingers and footfingers-“ another odd holdover from Losadunai – “And they are not black or cold. So death has not taken them.”

Ronata pulled aside the hide that closed off the steam lodge dome. The dome was made partially of a rock outcropping and partially from an enormous tent made of multiple indistinguishable hides, propped broadly by wood and bone supports. In the centre, the source of the sauna-like heat, was a pit of hot, steamy water, fueled by the heat of the earth. It was a creamy cyan blue unlike any lake she’d ever seen.

Although she and her companions were no longer stiff with cold, they were exhausted from the ordeal and spent most of the day lying down or relaxing, alternating between shivering and sweating. As evening approached, Nele was the only one not to stir. Lisonia was plopping rocks into a teapot beside Nele’s bed.

Noticing the other person entering, Lisonia spoke: “If you make cold persons drink warm tea, it warm them from inside to outside.” Her Zelandoni was not as good as Vodari’s but it showed an understanding of syntax. Ronata supposed the language was easy to pick up for a Losadunai speaker.

“Has she risen yet?”

“She has opened her eyes without saying words.”

Ronata approached the dozing Nele while Lisonia filled her teapot with a spicy bark and some warm-aroma flowers. Ronata recognized some of them as being a typical winter morning drink. She sat on the edge of Nele’s bed and ran a hand through the disarray of black curls on her high, smooth forehead.

“Sweet, you need to wake up. This woman wants to give you tea to keep you warm,” Ronata leafed through her thoughts, wishing she could find encouraging words, even if her companion wouldn’t hear. “The boys are all up, and we’re okay. We made it to the Losadunai, and we met the acolyte. You’ll like him. You’ll be friends, I’m sure.” Choking slightly on those last words, she pulled a hand through the tangled coils of Nele’s dark hair. Her braid had surely come undone in the water.

Lisonia handed Ronata a cup of the tea. She took a sip – it did taste delicious – and propped Nele’s head up, putting the steaming wooden cup to her lips.

“I love you”

Nele heard an indistinct voice through the blackness. She felt the lapping of the water onto her body. She felt the soaking arms of Darandar and Ronata; she felt their hearts through their chests, beating warm blood through their frozen bodies. She felt their arms pull away; she felt wind; she felt fingers on her skin. She saw black; she felt steam; she smelled spice. Her tongue curled back in in the starting of a syllable. She tasted hot, spicy water on her lips; she felt fur on her skin. She sputtered and choked, not on the icy water of the river, but on a warm tea her parched throat for which her throat wasn’t ready.

Her eyelashes weren’t heavy with ice anymore. She opened her eyes. Unfamiliar woman nearby. Sleep.

Her eyelashes were light and dry, her skin was so warm. She opened her eyes. Three familiar faces stood vigil – icy blue eyes, dark brown eyes, woodsy green eyes. Three pairs. Darandar, Kenalal, Ronata. Unfamiliar woman, unfamiliar room. Unfamiliar language prickling at her ears. More tea, steaming hot, slipped easier down her throat.

“Thirsty,” she said, voice meek.

All the voices in the room responded with a breath of relief. 


	12. Chapter 12

Ronata followed Lisonia to a hut set apart from the residential caves, carrying armfuls of greens and plant twine. In the few short days since her group had arrived to the Losadunai, winter weather came in and out of the region like the tides, alternating sunny, autumn days with mornings that dawned crusty with ice.

“Retainingarea, keeperzone,” Ronata started, making fumbling attempts to translate the word for storage cellar, “Very nice. It is big, it is full. It will be a good winter for you.”

Lisonia chuckled at the way Ronata had stretched out ‘ _weeenter’_ “A good winter for you people, too. You make a good attempt at speaking Losadunai, I will say,” Lisonia said, articulating slowly and clearly.

“It is not hard. I think. It is similar to Zelandoni. We change mostonly accent on words, a few sounds.”

“Mostonly!” the ginger woman echoed with a laugh. She stepped upon a stool in the corner of the cellar and started slinging the twine over a bone rod installed in the ceiling. In the cold, dry conditions, the herbs would desiccate, lasting well into winter. Though greens had little caloric value in lean times, their bursts of flavour would be a welcome change from dried meat.

“That is a thing I notice, yes, both languages make many words one, but both languages don’t make same many words one. Vodari and you do same when you speak Zelandoni!”

“Vodari speaks Zelandoni extremely well, he only makes those types of mistakes now. And I think with him carrying on with Munavan and Luzacam like he does, he’ll have it mastered by the longday!”

Ronata continued handing the woman bundles of herbs, which she hung on the rod one by one.

“I infact wanted to ask, since my friends and I will be traveling longfar, it would be handy if we knew more than Zelandoni and Losadunai. Do you know anyone among you who knows more languages?”

“Well, Vodari and I have a friend Kavaroa from another Cave, and she speaks S’Armunai fluently. She’s from there.”

Ronata bit her lip and considered. The group had been planning a more southern route, to get near the coast of the South Sea until they reached the Black Sea. They could probably miss the S’Armunai territory altogether. Besides, trips to other Caves were not common in the winter, especially with a group that didn’t even know the area.

“Oh,” Lisonia said, hopping down from the stool, “I remember hearing once that we’d had people among us who came from the Mamutoi. But they have all died since then. I couldn’t imagine travelling so far.” 

Ronata’s eyes lit up, “I heard Mamutoi once from a traveler! When I a thirteenyears, a Mamutoi group visited our summer meeting. I listened and learned some, even though I was young.” She took on a far-off look, recalling the sounds. She unleashed a short string of syllables, far more clipped and less musical than either Zelandonii or Losadunai, with tightly rolled Rs and full of sibilants like _z_ and _sh._

“What was that?” Lisonia asked. For ears very accustomed to the liquid and gentle languages of the west, Mamutoi sounded harsh and guttural.

“I said, ‘it would be good if we made it that far’, but I don’t think I said it right.”

“It sounded good to me!”

“Well, you wasn’t bornraised Mamutoi, right?”

“No, but I like to think I have an ear for language,” Lisonia reasoned.

“If that’s true, then in winter you will help me get moregood at Losadunai. Practice for future. Even if I don’t need it, it will getready me to learn what other language I _do_ meet on the way.” 

Nele awoke with a burst of energy she hadn’t felt in quite some time. After four days of doing very little except for lie in bed- first in the steam huts, then in a guest dwelling she and her party shared - she finally felt back to her old self. She left the sleeping area and came to the cooking fire at the entrance, to find no one there other than Darandar. He turned to her and smiled.

“You look to be in good shape,” he exclaimed.

“Four days bedrest can do that do a girl,” she said sweetly, and lowered herself to a cross-legged position on the ground.

“Check it out,” he said, revealing a pouch of small, white orbs, “We found eggs. Ronata says that doves lay all through winter. Would you like some?”

She plucked one of the fragile white objects from his sachet. They were slightly oblong and had a pinkish tone to the shell. “Want me to show you how Ronata makes and egg?”

“You can cook? Like Ronata?” he asked, incredulous.

She laughed in sharp gulps of air. “I am not good at it, and I don’t love it like she does, but she showed me some things! Just trust me.”

“Wait, wait,” he chuckled uncertainly, gently snatching the egg back. “Let me show you something first.” He pulled a pot of room-temperature water between them.

“Don’t you dare boil a perfectly good egg! I don’t think I could stand the smell after spending all this time near the springs.”

“Oh, tell me about it,” he said, gently plopping the egg into the water. “I guess the Losadunai are just used to the smell. Hopefully, we will be used to it too by the end of winter, or else I’ll be losing my meals like a woman who’s just been blessed. Alright, so watch this, see the egg?”

“Not really,” Nele said with a smirk.

“Exactly, it sunk. If it sinks, then it’s going to be a nice sun-yellow yolk. If it floats, then it means there could be a baby bird inside. We could still eat it, of course, but you would want to prepare it differently.”

“Strange how birds are blessed outside the body. Birds don’t get pregnant,” she wanted to add, ‘like we do’, but the wording would leave bitter taste in her mouth.

“Do you think the Mother, like, cracks an egg inside a woman’s body when she is blessed? What if that’s how a baby starts? She picks a man’s sprit to splat an egg, like,” he made a clicking noise with the edges of his teeth.

Nele laughed. “Give me that,” she said, snatching the egg back from the water pot. “So, we get a flat rock hot, right,” she pulled back a handful of her long tunic to keep it far from the fire. “We let it get a bit cool, not burning hot. We rub an edge of fat over the rock, as so,” she greased the flat stone with a thin layer of animal fat, spread with a strip of smooth fish-leather. Breathing in, she cracked the egg as gently and perfectly as she could. “Take a long knife and kind of, rub the edges inwards so it doesn’t spread too wide. A little salt and herbs on the yellow, and,” she flipped a heat-resistant cooking basket over the hot rock, careful not to touch it directly against the fire. “We wait.”

“So we burn a cooking basket…?”

“No!” she said with a giggle. “The fire does its magic underneath the basket.”

The two stared at each other in silence for a moment. Nele was the first to look away, a bit bashful. “I wanted to say, by the way, thank you.”

“Thanks for what?”

“I don’t know if I’d be alive without you.”

His forehead took on knots of confusion. “I don’t understand.”

“When I was wet on the shore, you were there…” Nele trailed off, as the edges of Darandar’s mouth cracked into a tiny smile. “Vodari says you helped to keep me warm. I’m a weak, useless little thing.” She added this in mock self-deprecation. “Lucky I have men to lead me around. Oh, and Ronata.”

“I barely remember,” he admitted. “But I’m glad to help.”

“I remember,” she said, feeling a flush of warmth down the skin of her throat. She jumped, and suddenly remembered to flip the basket off the egg. The edges were slightly brown but the yolk was still wet and shiny. She gently slid a small scapula under the egg and shrugged it onto a platter.

“The yolk is so wet, though,” He said, scrunching his nose.

“Just trust me,” she said, rewarded by her task. 

Kenalal crossed his arms and looked down at two benches spilling over with objects.

“Thank Doni for parfleches,” he said with a deep sigh. Many of the items that had been soaked in the drink during their impromptu river crossing had survived due to being stored in rawhide containers or waterbags. Nele, showing uncommon wisdom, had tied her many decorative belts up in the remains of a busted drinking bag. That had saved them from being damaged. Some of their leather clothing items, however, had gone stiff from the water and would need to be reworked to softness. He was glad they had at least the whole winter to work on it. Nonetheless, he pinched at the sides of his temples. He could hear Munavan and Luzacam boisterously fooling around with instruments a room over, an activity they’d been partaking in from the very moment Vodari had expressed interest in the concept. Nele was in bed half the time, and Darandar and Ronata often vanished on their own, too. Kenalal wanted so badly to relax and appreciate the break from traveling, but he knew that it would be a matter of time before the members of his group would need to pull their weight. The sooner they prepared to set out again, the more he could relax in later winter. At least, that’s what he rationalized.

To stay here, they demanded shares of food, and it wasn’t easy to share during winter. They’d take up space, furs, firewood, and the emotional labour of hospitality. Kenalal had to be sure he did not underhand his hosts – it would read poorly on the reputation of his people. He wondered if Munavan bothered to think of these things.

With another heaving sigh, he pulled out his leather thigh cover and his hammerstone, and sat holding one of the flint piece he’d cleaved off a larger stone. Whenever Kenalal had to think, he’d knap flint. Whenever Kenalal wanted to _stop_ thinking, he’d knap flint. With precise, well-placed bops with worn antler tools, he whittled the thick, oblong stone to a razor’s edge. Keeping his hands busy was a benefit to knapping, but it served a more practical purpose, too: Kenalal was beginning to work on the payment they’d owe the Losadunai come spring.

Ronata was relieved to find all the pieces of Nele’s slender body exactly where she remembered them being before any of this river crossing madness had begun. She felt her limbs, long and smooth like birch saplings, and tangled her fingers into her dark waves, unbraided and untied. They had barely taken any time at all to be intimate during their travels – for privacy and for fairness to their unattached companions, they didn’t want to flaunt their interest. Now, finally having a permanent dwelling in which to reside, they relished the comfort and warmth.

“You seem to be back to your old self now,” Ronata said, kissing her deeply and with the softness of relief.

“I thanked Darandar today, for helping me. But he doesn’t remember. He put his arms around me and it kept me from getting too cold.”

Ronata smirked and raised an eyebrow. “I was there too, you know.”

Nele squinted, trying to cull memories from the black gap of that morning. “With him?”

“My sweet fool, I wouldn’t let you freeze.” She wrapped her arms around the slim woman.

They extinguished the fungus wick on their fat lamp and fell asleep nestled into the furs. As she drifted to sleep, Nele still pictured herself tangled up in two sets of arms.


	13. Chapter 13

Ronata and Darandar sauntered in the light, powdery snow of early winter. They were ostensibly in search of the last remaining autumn fruits, intending to offer a sweet treat to cap off a special event whose planning was underway. Vodari had said something about the hot pools, which fascinated the visitors. Their escapade really served, however, to give them as many chances as they could snag to venture forth into Losadunai territory before winter kept them mostly confined to the dwellings of their hosts, surrounded by people still quite unfamiliar to them.

While much of the best fruit had been plucked during the late summer and autumn harvesting season, some were left behind to face the frost. It was an open secret of fruit collecting that fruit snatched in the precarious period between its first exposure to frost and its brown purification of true freezing had a sweet, concentrated taste. These fruits were also especially good for making alcoholic brews, and Darandar kept this in mind as he filled his haversack.

Walking on a narrow ridge, just wide enough to accommodate them side by side, the two fell into easy conversation.

“So you might know this now, but I’ve been chosen for First Rights,” Darandar said. It was considered a great honour to be selected for the ceremonial deflowering of a young virgin, especially if this honour was coming from a foreign people. “I want to say yes, but I’m scared, honestly.”

Ronata grinned widely and gave her friend a nudge on the shoulder. “It’s the young girl who should be scared. You gave Vodari a good show our first day here – and I have quickly learned the Losadunai word for ‘stallion’.”

Darandar squinted and tilted his head, “What do you mean?” his eyes widened in comprehension, “Aw, no! Are they really talking about me?”

Ronata laughed, “I’m sure anything I heard was purely incidental! So, do you know the girl?”

“I’ve seen here. Her name is Saferia. I think she’s a little older, and that makes it easier. I would find it very weird to perform First Rites on a girl who could only count ten or eleven years, I think it would be like sharing pleasures with a sibling.”

“Rand, you don’t have any siblings.”

“You don’t need siblings to just know it would be gross to share pleasures with one! I haven’t honestly shared pleasures with anyone since Sheveza. We did it the day before we left.”

Ronata gave him an unimpressed look. How many times during this trip had he complained his former mate was out of her mind? He’d neglected to mention – until now – that he’d still been taking his pleasure in the very woman that had been threatening to him.

“I never did First Rites before, because Sheveza discouraged me. Before I mated her, I was a bit young for it. They don’t usually get men who are only two or three years older than the girls do it. Sheveza kind of acted like if I shared pleasures with another woman, I’d be wasting my spirit that could instead mix with hers.”  
“That makes no sense whatsoever,” Ronata cut in, “That’s like saying there’s a limit to how many children one can have. And it especially doesn’t make sense to say it about a man. I am sure if a woman kept a man caged in her tent, they’d spend enough time near each other for the spirits to mix, but I really doubt that the Mother would bless a woman for treating a man like that. She may have not given them the ability to make babies, but She didn’t make men to be inferior, and a woman forcing a man into pleasures is no better than a man forcing a woman.”

“I know,” he said, exasperated, “And I’m not nervous about it being painful or anything, I’m worried about it being awkward,” he mused, pulling a dried mint stalk from his pouch and chewing it. “You know?” he added, articulation muffled by the plant in his mouth, “You barely know her, you speak different languages, you’ve got to impress her,” he let out one of his high, breathy laughs, “And _apparently,_ I’m a stallion. So that makes it worse.”

“Well if she doesn’t know any better, shouldn’t that make it less awkward?” Ronata offered lamely. She had mixed feelings about First Rites, and somehow wished she could know what they were like from the other side.

The mint stalk had become a squishy bolus in his mouth, inhibiting his speech further. “I feel dumb saying this to you. Obviously, First Rites must have been really awkward for you.” 

“What do you mean?” Ronata said, furrowing her brows.

“You did do First Rites, right?”

“Yes, it was Nilagan of the third for me. Skinny, blond guy.”

He spit the chewed mint pulp on a patch of snow. “I have seen him, I think. I’m surprised that guy knows how to please a woman.”

Ronata smiled brightly, “I was younger for it, because I was so big. Muscular and tall girls tend to start their moontimes earlier. But he was so sweet, I loved him. I’m glad it was him.”

“I just figured it would be awkward to…”

She stopped in her tracks for a moment, eying him quizzically, and with a bit of amusement.

“…share pleasures with a man. Since, I mean. You and Nele…” he finished.

She let out a big puff of air, the chopped beginnings of a laugh. “If you’re asking me if I like sharing pleasures with men, I do. I have done it before. Nele is wonderful, women are wonderful, but men are wonderful too.”

His grey-blue eyes brightened. “Oh, I have known many people – particularly those who drink with Denicol – who say they love both, but usually they will end up mating like normal, even if they share pleasures with both.”

“Well, sometimes that’s how I thought it would be for me, too.” She stayed silent for a moment after saying this. It was not only Ronata _herself_ that had imagined a mating-like-normal, and though she swore up and down she regretted nothing about her choices, Darandar’s inquiry has sent a strangely wistful feeling through her. “I don’t really regret how it went, though. I’m glad enough that Nele’s a girl.”

They reached the edge of the ridge and faced down a gentle slope that led them back to the region of the cave. They adjusted their packs to keep their hands free.

“So, would you ever kiss a man again?” Darandar said, suddenly.

“Yes, of course I would.”

“How about right now?”

He closed in on her in such a flash she barely understood what had happened. The kiss had seemed so quick, so normal, that it was as though he’d just handed her a mint leaf or a crab apple. As soon as their mouths parted, Darandar laughed heartily and hurried down the slope. He left Ronata at the top, flushed of face and tremorous of heart, with a taste of mint in her mouth. 

Feasts and celebrations were a regular occurrence in the winter season to break up the monotony the largely sedentary time. Even in late winter, a feast could be scrounged together of knobby, long-stored roots and the lean, tough meat of hungry winter kills. These dishes would be smothered in as many dried herbs and spices they could manage to prop up an otherwise unremarkable dish, and having the diners imbibe a good quantity of brew – which unlike many foodstuffs, didn’t go bad all season regardless of how it was stored – would trick them into finding more deliciousness than was truly present.

When the Zelandoni sextet had been at the Losadunai camp for around half a moon, it was decided that there would be a celebration of sorts, but mostly, it was a quasi-ceremonial occasion to allow the curious travelers the opportunity to finally take advantage of the tantalizing hot pools.

The meal being prepared was, to a certain extent, a bittersweet farewell to summer goods. While it did not appear as the most festive meal on its face, a massive bowl of salad made of fresh greens and flower petals was a centerpiece – it would be a long time before a dish comprised of such fresh, crunchy vegetable matter would be accessible again. Some fruits were also served fresh and sliced, showing off crisp skins and minimal bruising, which would be another quality lost to winter, when cooked compotes would be the most palatable way of eating fruit, along with a variety of raisin-like dried ones. The healthy, plant-filled meal was not only a matter of using up that which would rot. It was also a convenient accompaniment to the evening’s activity – nobody wanted to feel bloated and full of food during a soak in the hot pools.

“Who made this?” Darandar said, as he sipped a fruity, fermented drink. Lisonia raised a hand with a grin.

“I like you,” he said in response.

“Dark plum was the fruit to make wine,” she said, already refining her Zelandoni from her time with the visitors, “I am not master brewer but I like to practice. If you want something stronger, we have the artemisia brew, too.”

“Perhaps a lesson in brewing would be a good occasion to share our languages, too,” Ronata suggested.

The young curly-haired acolyte began to fuss with a tightly-woven water basket and placed rocks in the fire. “Too much wine can be dangerous in the hot pools, but we do like to drink a tea that relaxes a little. Yarrow, chamomile,” he hesitated, not remembering the Zelandoni word, “Other things. Not too much – Losaduna of the past have been lost by trying too hard to find magic in the pools.”

Some of the members of the group made uncomfortable expressions. Vodari continued, “They say manymuch generations ago, when our people first arrived here, we camped in a cave on the other side of the mountain. The Losadunai had a young acolyte – some legends say Silosi, I’ve heard Chilosi – anyway, he was meditating with the magic herbs,” he paused for a moment, poking at the stones in the fire and tapping his pouches to be sure he had the ingredients with him. “And he heard the calling, the calling that someone gets when they are ready to be Losaduna. In his daze, he was led far from the camp of his people, and he was drawn to this scent of stonerot.”

The visitors listened, intrigued.

“It was winter, and he was cold. Lost in the freeze, not able to find his way in the snow. But he felt this warm in the air, coming on the wind with the stonerot. He followed; he was called. The ice was making his fingers freeze, but he followed. He finally came upon the caverns, and the hot pools. He dove straight into the water!” Vodari held his breath for an instant, creating some tension in the story, “But his body was so full of ice that the heat was too shocking. It was like falling through the ice on a frozen lake, but in reverse. Like throwing a bone still wet with marrow into a fire; it hisses and it pops. All the ice in his blood thawed in an instant, and he died.”

“Well, that’s grim.” Luzacam interjected.

“His kin and friends managed to follow his footsteps the next day, and suddenly noticed the stonerot smell, which they hadn’t, before, even if it was quite nearby. They followed it until they reached the hot pools, and though they couldn’t save the acolyte, they had found the healing waters.”

Lisonia let out a groan of outrage, “Vodari, seriously? Why would you choose that story to tell our guests before inviting them to the pools? There are many legends about the hot pools, and you chose one about death?”

Vodari shrugged. “I think it teaches important lessons. First, pools are scary, be careful. Second, it shows us that sometimes we get great gifts from the Mother but it comes at a high cost. We know the waters are healing, but it took someone’s life energy to give those healing powers to us.”

“Great Earth Mother, could you have at least chosen a story about the healing effects of the pools?”

Vodari sprinkled his herbs into the now-boiling basket of water. “I’ll tell those ones later!”

Even after months of traveling together, Munavan was a little shy to show this much skin in front of his companions. Always heftier than most, the hard walking of the past few moons left him leaner and spryer than before, though still larger in width and height than the other men of his party. He had an emblem tattooed into his pectoral, cut with razor-sharp flint and blackened with ochre, and ever since he’d earned such a mark he was confident in showing it off. He anticipated the day he’d earn more – perhaps this journey would afford him some. His face would likely remain unmarked forever, though – unlike Vodari, with the enviable mark of an acolyte etched lightly into his temple.

The cloudy, mineral-filled water was sufficiently opaque to hide everything below his upper chest when he slipped into the pool. He’d expected to do so gracefully, but that same opacity that offered confidentiality concealed the edges of the floor. He lost his footing and fell heavily. He felt his face warm when he heard the first laugh coming from Luzacam, but when a far heartier laugh erupted from Kenalal, he decided to take the blow on his pride with good humor.

“Like a bison in a pit trap,” he jabbed at himself.

“Anyone ever see a mammoth in a pit trap?” Luzacam shot back.

“Oh, come now. I’ve gone from mammoth to bison from all that walking. Give me that at least,” Munavan said.

He quieted down. Usually an avid conversationalist, he took a moment to block out the blabbering of his friends and focus on the foreign sensation of warm water. It wasn’t too much work to use hot stones to boil a basket of water, but it would be an impossible task to not only weave a basket big enough and solid enough to hold a bathing man, but to fill it with enough hot stones to warm the water without overflowing the basket with rapidly-cooling pebbles. What thorough bathing the Zelandonii did do was more akin to the chilly splash the group had taken after their bear hunt. At best, they could swim in the sun-warmed shallows in summer weather, and in winter, heat a bowl of water and pigweeds to scrub the body down with a rabbit skin. Only the Great Earth Mother could create such a large vessel of perfectly heated water.

Munavan could scarcely detect the boundary between his skin and the water – the inside of his body and the water around him were nearly identical in temperature. With dissolved minerals in far greater quantities than in fresh water, he was also more buoyant than he’d be in a typical lake. At that moment, he understood well why some would call these hot pools “water of Duna’s womb”. He couldn’t imagine a baby in its mother’s belly being any cozier than this.

Nele peered into the perimeter of the hot spring, concealing herself behind a stone pillar. She wrapped her arms around her body, pressing the oversized Losadunai tunic she’d borrowed into the crevices of her form. She was uncomfortably aware of every piece of her.

She kept a cautious gaze on her companions, bare chests visible above the water line. Luzacam noticeably hairy-chested, and Kenalal and Darandar, somewhat slimmer and smoother-skinned. Her eyes lingered particularly on the last man, who was laughing that same, sharp laugh, tensing the twine of the muscle between his collarbone and neck. She urged herself to go in. Ronata could. She took in a sharp breath, and let it out with a gasp when a voice came from behind her.

“Are you going in?” Vodari said, friendly as ever.

“I…don’t know,” she uttered.

“You know, Lisonia will bring you to a women-only pool if it would make you comfortable. I know most of your companions are men, but even among the Losadunai some prefer a sexdivided soak.”

She opened her mouth and closed it again, considering without speaking. “I’m…not sure.”

The acolyte, often aloof, sized her up for a moment. Taller than he and as slender as a filly, she seemed on the surface like a pretty girl. Her jaw was strongly built and ended in a squareish chin, and her eyes, green like some of the hottest of sacred pools, were framed with thick, dark eyebrows and lashes. Was it something in her gait, in her voice? He couldn’t put a finger on it, but he somehow knew not to press. Instead, he smiled one of his disarming smiles, cheeks balling up like crabapples.

“Come with me,” he said, “While you decide if you want to soak, I’ll show you something special.”


	14. Chapter 14

The night air was cold enough for Nele to see puffs of her own breath. She wrapped a bearskin around her and followed Vodari down a tight sloped path. Her hands were occupied holding the bearskin shut; Vodari held a lit torch. The pair entered what looked like, from the outside, a little niche. Nele could smell the acrid, eggy smell of the open pools, and cracked a tiny smile. Vodari held the torch against a wall and ignited a fungus-wicked lamp that had been nestled unseen in the darkness. She took a few steps forward, close to Vodari’s back.

She took in a sharp breath and marveled at the cave. The ceiling glittered with salt-crusted stalactites, sharp and white like teeth in a stone maw. Some areas of the walls were crystal-white and rugged with minerals, and some areas were burnished with orange sediment, and even a few patches of murky green. She shrugged off her bearskin, leaving only her loose tunic, as the cave was far warmer than the outside air. Nele tread carefully across a floor riddled with small, steaming-hot puddles of opaque, opalescent water, of unseen depths.

“This water would be too hot to soak in, even if it was big enough. It is hot enough you could make a tea with it, though it would not be good to taste, as there are salts and rocks in the water. But this place is both sacred and comfortable because the hot pools turn the entire cave into a steam room. Those Who Serve like using this one to meditate – it’s safer to take herbs or go into a trance when you aren’t submerged.” The acolyte explained.

Nele didn’t speak for a moment. “It’s beautiful in here. It’s warm.”

Vodari indicated a seat, a flattened mineral outcropping. He lit another lamp in a niche, while Nele draped her bearskin over the outcropping and sat down.

He was already fiddling with a skin that he placed above a tiny, steamy pit. He warmed some water, and pulled something out of his pouch.

“Can I offer you some special tea?” Vodari asked, indicating a little woven straw pouch, with greyish lumps vaguely visible inside.

“What is that? Will it make me wander off and fall into a pool?”

“No, it’s a very small dose, it’s a special dried mushroom that Those Who Serve use sometimes in meditation. I wouldn’t give its full power to someone uninitiated.” He plopped the mushrooms, pouch and all, into the hot water. He left it to soak for a while.

“This place is incredible. Why did you bring me here?”

“The pools, you weren’t feeling them,” he started, “I could tell. I get a certain impression from you.”

Nele withdrew for an instant. “A bad impression?”

“No,” he replied, “Just an impression. Shamans get those feelings sometimes.”

He watched her take a tentative sip of the tea. Mushrooms were Nele’s favorite food – she could eat a platter of fried mushrooms and sweet little onions, cooked to a caramel brown, as a meal to itself. This didn’t taste quite like food mushrooms – it was like a mushroom soup broth, but unsalted, and bitter, with a stale aftertaste like foodstuffs that had been forgotten in a winter cellar through to the next summer. She hoped it had magic like alcoholic drinks did, because it wasn’t worth much on flavor alone. She chatted idly with Vodari as she emptied her cup.

In the middle of listening to Vodari go on a tirade about the nature of the human spirit outside its fleshy vessel – _Doni,_ she thought, _this man was made to be a Losaduna or a Zelandoni –_ Nele began to notice that every glittering speckle of salt on the stalactites behind his head glistened like morning snow. She could detect each one like a pinprick, like a star in the night sky. The steam that rose from the pools condensed on the ceiling, pooled in smooth, pearly blobs, and slid down the sharp relief of the mineral spikes. They came to a drip, as fine as a teardrop, and fell from the pointed tip of each stalactite, sometimes hitting flat ground, and sometimes encountering a matching, if not smaller, stalagmite jutting from the cavern floor. In an instant, Nele’s mind connected the dots on how this cavern must have formed – countless years, beyond the reach of any human, of drips and drops. Each drop brought with it undetectably sparse granules of salt or stone, and built the toothy outcroppings like the slow knitting of a broken bone. She was mesmerized, realizing she was no longer listening to Vodari.

“What is this?” Nele asked abruptly. Vodari looked at her. “The caves, the water. What is it?”

“Do you want a legend, or do you want the simple explanation?”

She contemplated. “I want the truest version you have.”

“Do you know what lies beneath the earth?”

Nele cracked a warm, pensive smile, thinking of the conversation Darandar had initiated that night before the first river crossing. “I have wondered before. We have caves that take us deep, and it gets colder. But many people say that Doni sometimes has wounds that bleed like any gash or boil on a human. These wounds bleed hot, thick blood – hotter than fire, so hot you can’t even look at it close. It flows fluid and red like blood, and hardens dark, as blood. So the Earth has blood that scabs. But the Earth is made of dirt and stone, so the scabs harden into such.”

Vodari seemed not only satisfied, but impressed with her explanation. “You show me deepthoughts. Like One who Serves.”

“I didn’t come up with it on my own,” she protested, “Kenalal told us a lot of that. Most of what I know I’ve learned from my friends and mother. I only fill in some connections between them.”

Vodari chuckled, “My friend, that is the essence of wisdom! The Losaduna – or the Zelandonia, or the S’Armuna, or whatever you may call your holy men, they like to keep so much knowledge to themselves. As if the knowledge itself is what’s sacred. But I don’t really believe that. It’s like the legend of Silosi and the pools – the pools existed, he just had to find them. Everything mankind needs to survive is somewhere on this earth already, we just need to learn how to combine it. “

Nele wasn’t entirely sure if it was the mushroom tea or her own mind, but she embraced what he said and found herself intensely interested.

“So, yes, these pools are said to touch the Mothersblood, deep in the group. It is warm and wet, like the water of the womb. And as such, it cleans you and rebuilds you, like a baby being built inside the body of another.”

Nele stayed silent for a moment, and appreciated the subtle whirling the tea gave her – like the walls of the cavern were breathing. It gave her an intimate appreciation for the fact that everything in creation was really alive – even things like stone, which did not seem alive in the immediate way that humans and animals did.

She finally spoke, “Then I should swim in them, after all.”

“Then why don’t you?”

She sighed, brave from the loosening effect of the tea. “Because I am scared to be seen.”

He grinned, “But there are so many ways for bodies to be. And besides, there’s a women-only pool if it would help.”

“No. You see, I am not a typical woman.” She felt her heart stutter in her chest. She was finally at a point in her life where strangers didn’t detect much strangeness about her – not physically, at least. Was she really about to tell a new friend so much? Vodari revealed through his fixed gaze that he was very intrigued, and Nele realized she had already said too much. She couldn’t leave him without an explanation.

She took a deep breath, tilted her empty cup to her mouth in pure performance – taking in only the smallest droplet of cold tea remaining at the bottom – and began.

“When I was born, my mother chose the name Benaden.”

She heard Vodari take in a sharp breath, but she could tell he tried to stifle it.

“When I was a boy – and I say it like this because I feel as though I was never a girl, but never a man, just a boy who became a woman – I looked enough like a boy that no one knew I was any different. I felt different, though. I didn’t really understand the games boys played with just boys, but I didn’t feel much better spending time with just girls. When I got later on in childhood and some agemates started having first crushes, I came to realize I had the desire to start a hearth with men or with women. For a while, I thought maybe that was all that made me different – this of course made sense once I made friends with Ronata too, as in her heart she seems more man than woman, and she wants to share pleasures with both.”

Vodari nodded in understanding. While they didn’t have a name for it, the idea that a person would want to share pleasures with both sexes was rather common. Being _strictly_ interested in the same sex was a bit of a deviation – not enough to encourage punishment but considered a mildly incorrect use of the Mother’s gift. No more than choosing not to mate, and leagues less significant than something like wanting to mate a sibling, or a non-human, or wanting to share pleasures with a child who’d not yet been initiated to that gift. But to at least experiment with the same sex, that wasn’t uncommon. One could only assume that a large number of people who were co-mates in a three-person-hearth perhaps enjoyed each other’s company, too, instead of sharing one man or one woman.

“But it was more than that,” she continued. “When my friends were coming to the ages of First Rites and Doni-women, I had nothing. I grew taller and taller but my body did not change the way others did – women would get their moontimes, and grow breasts. Men would grow hair on their face and on their legs, sometimes their stomachs and chests. I had a few faint, dark hairs lining my jaw and my lip, and these,” she chuckled ruefully, “These sad, tiny sacs, the start of breasts. Even when I was fourteen, fifteen, I seemed trapped. And I grew to really hate my body then. I wanted to be a woman, a beautiful girl desired by men with long, flowing hair and full, pretty breasts. That’s what I wanted most. But I would have accepted being a man if I could have been _normal_.”

Vodari reeled with comprehension as he put the pieces of her story together. He did have an impression about her, but the impression was far more intuitive and far-reaching than he could have realized.

“I came to actually curse the Mother at times. For building me incorrectly. She made man and woman perfect for each other, then she made a mistake on me. The worst part is my mother was a medicine woman and I just refused to broach the topic with her. I was too full of shame.”

He filled with empathy for the young woman. While he couldn’t fully relate to her story, he sympathized acutely with the feeling of strangeness and otherness that followed her through life.

“It was only when I started to love Ronata that I finally felt safe. She made me feel,” she groped for a word, and gave up, “Good. In my body, as myself. She gave me courage. I spent a year away at a cave to the far south. And when I came home, Benaden was no more. I learned to shave so closely to my skin that those stubborn little hairs were gone. I got help to make a wardrobe of women’s clothes. I could have renamed myself a more typical Zelandoni women’s name – Karina came to mind, and oh I wish I’d known Losadunai names, because I love the –ia sound at the end! But I just used a short form of my own name, a name Ronata had used on me before.”

Vodari smiled at her, “Well you are living truthfully now. Are you happy?”

She considered his question. “Honestly, yes. I never knew I could feel so good. I have friends. They, at least, see me for me, even if some other people were harsh. I feel almost as though I have corrected the errors of my birth. I don’t even hate my body anymore, truthfully, but I have fears. I can live with having a deep voice, and being so tall, I know some people notice, but they don’t bother me much. But I am jealous sometimes that my friends can simply want to share pleasures with whoever they want, and the worst that will happen is the other says no. I cannot offer myself to someone, because they will know I am different than what a woman should be, and on top of that, everyone knows that this body could never be blessed, so why bother? And I am different from a man, too, so even women wouldn’t want me. Except Ronata.” She leaned back a bit, taking a deep breath. “And that is why I was nervous to be in the pools.”

She finally looked at Vodari, and was alarmed to see his eyes were alight with ardor. “I am grateful you would share that with me, Nele,” he began, “But there is something you do not see. And forgive me, because I don’t want to make you feel ungrateful. But the Earth Mother did not make a mistake when she created you.”

“She didn’t? I definitely felt like a mistake for the first fifteen or sixteen years of my life, and even now I sometimes do.”

“No – what does the Mother’s song say?”

“It says a lot of things!” Nele said, “It is a long song.”

“True,” he said. He then recited a segment of rhyming couplets, vaguely evoking the song as it was sung in Zelandoni, but with some rhymes a bit different, and the different tonal stress of Losadunai giving it an exotic, melodious measure. He switched back to her language. “The Mother made it so that man and woman desire to join with each other. They have a longing, deep and primal. Do you know why?”

Nele squirmed as if she was being quizzed. “Uh….because pleasures feel nice?”

“Yes! But also because the spirit of each living thing is _the same sort of spirit_ – not different for male and female as much as in fleshbody. When we join, we become more complete, because we put the male and female back together.”

“You are mostly leading me to feel bad about wanting to be a woman while also wanting to mate a woman.”

“No,” he corrected with a slightly embarrassed smile, “Don’t you see? Those who have both male and female inside them were made special by The Mother. They are in some ways closer to the spirit form. I am surprised no one has told you this –“

“The Zelandoni of my Cave would disagree.”

“But people with such mixtures inside them are very often drawn to Serve They have a special magic within them.”

Nele stared at him, a smile splitting across her face and just as quickly vanishing, in alternation. She wasn’t sure how to feel.

“And that is why I had an ‘impression’ from you. Maybe I didn’t look at you and say, ‘that woman was once a boy’, maybe I looked at you and said ‘that woman could have a way with spirits, if it was fed’.”

Nele looked around, the contours of the cave still lightly wriggling in the corners of her vision. She felt tears lick at the edges of her eyes. Part of her screamed, _all I ever wanted was to be a normal woman. I will never be blessed, I will never be normal._ But another part of her was blown open like a dam, letting unfettered anticipation rush though her.

“Are you alright?” Vodari asked, seeing the water welling in the corners of her eyes, the redness making a marked contrast to the green of the iris.

“It’s just,” she breathed, “Nobody else has ever convinced me I was made like this for a reason.”


	15. Chapter 15

“When humans were first put forth from the Mother’s creation, we were of course given the gift of Perception; the gift of Learning. Unlike some animals, who seem to be born knowing most of what they need, humans are born useless, cute lumps with a desire to learn. And in our natural environment, we are surrounded by all the resources we need to thrive – one of the mother’s gifts – and the intelligence to learn how to use them – which is another gift.”

Munavan began his story with bombastic pretention. Now deep into the winter season, the temporarily-sedentary traveling party spent many evenings telling stories around the fire, for an audience of not just themselves, but their hosts. Lisonia and Vodari, having spent the most time with the travelers, were getting very accustomed to their language, and the travelers had likewise absorbed enough Losadunai that there were rarely any problems in communication. A few others from the Cave, including their Losaduna, had made strides, too. By now, the whole Zelandonii traveling party, Lisonia and Vodari, and a reasonable handful of other people were all able and willing to listen to a legend told in Zelandoni.

Munavan was one of the better storytellers of the group – Nele was known to get off-track, Kenalal a bit too austere in his wording, and Darandar was guilty of both. Munavan usually preferred to tell personal stories, but this evening, he elected to tell a legend, one with a humorous twist.

“Before humans discovered the lands north of the southern seas, they survived mostly on meat, and sometimes had to little they needed to chew the tough, gamey flesh of carnivores. To avoid succumbing to Meat Starvation, they would fill their bellies with sharp, bitter blades of grass, chewing cud like aurochs and eating meat like scavengers.”

The phenomena of ‘meat starvation’ was something the ancient peoples of glacial periods had to learn to contend with – if they had no access to carbohydrate matter during the winter, and exclusively ate the lean, nearly fat-free flesh of hungry late-winter animals, they could die of starvation even if they ate more than their minimum requirement of calories. The protein had to be supplemented with other macronutrients to keep their bodies running, which is why the Losadunai, Zelandoni, and all other peoples of the time took great pains to store roots, grains, rendered fats, and dried-out fruits and vegetables to leave themselves a durable winter supply.

Munavan continued in a style that effortlessly skirted the boundary between dramatic and conversational. “They ventured across lands as dry and harsh as the great mammoth steppes, but hotter, with ground that crumbled like bone char. But they eventually came upon a new land, a lush river valley with foods they’d never known. The trees grew fat fruits of many shapes and sizes – some were oily and not sweet at all, some were juicy and coloured like the sun. But one fruit was special. These red berries had a special magic to them – if a person crushed them into juice and drank it, they would start to feel the world swirl around them. They would feel very brave and emboldened, too, and get a great love of food and fun.”

Some of the audience began to chuckle, recognizing the implication in the story.

“These fruits made it harder to walk, but easier to talk. It made it easier to want pleasures, but harder to get them. The people quickly grew obsessed with the fruit, and it seemed the trees were everywhere, so they never ran out. It was fun for festivals and gathering, but soon people were drinking the juice from morning until night. Mothers’ milk would turn pink and make their babies sick. The hunters stumbled around and couldn’t even catch hamsters. But because of the bounty of the trees, they grew fatter-” he slapped his stomach with a resonating sound “-instead of starving. But their people stagnated, and eventually they even expended all their desire to share pleasures and instead thought only of the fruit.”

Kenalal, developing an ear for Losadunai, smirked when he heard a man whisper to someone else, “ _That sounds like my former mate.”_

“Doni saw this, and was displeased. The world was ours to use, but not to abuse, and the people we no longer honouring Her in any way. She sent a storm of rain for moons on end, and the roots of the fruit trees grew soggy, and the fruits molded and turned dark. When the rain finally cleared, the people were devastated. Some were unaccustomed to being clear-headed, and some were so used to having the fruits inside them, that the got sick with cramps and vomiting just from its absence. Even when they ground dried and days passed with no rain, the fruits did not come back. When a whole turning of the seasons passed, the fruits still did not return. The shaman of the people, who himself had gotten overly invested in the fruit, meditated for a long time, cleared of his inhibitions. He asked the Great Mother what could be done.”

“Doni said, ‘I showed you the way to this land so you could make more of yourselves than the starving animals you were. But you have rejected the chance to be better, preferring indolence. No longer will the magic fruit be easy. Like the joy of motherhood, the joy of Inebriation will come with labour!”

The audience was amused by the story, and very enraptured. It was a serious origin legend that may have had links to reality, but the subject matter offered it a certain pleasant lightheartedness. When speaking in-character as Doni, Munavan had put his hands on his waist in such a way to clamp his tunic and give him a somewhat voluptuous shape, evoking the highly exaggerated curves of Donii figures.

“When the shaman returned to the valley he was met with the people rushing into the fields to pluck the familiar red fruits from the trees. They had returned! The people filled their baskets joyously. The shaman was confused – why would Doni return Her gift if no one had learned their lesson? The people returned to their camps, baskets overflowing, and devoured the fruit without even crushing them for juice. They were quickly disappointed to discover these fruit were like any other, now – their magic was gone. The shaman thought back on what he’d learned during his meditation. _The fruit now demanded labour._ Usually, the labour involved in fruit was picking them, maybe cutting off rinds or breaking shells, or sometimes cooking them. He asked many people of the tribe to attempt these techniques, to no avail. The shaman soon accepted the magic of the fruit was lost to them. He knew the people had lost a gift because of their sloth and ungratefulness.”

“Then one day, a young woman was weaving a basket in the shade of one of the fruit trees. She had been too young during the arrival of the tribe in the valley to have been deeply involved in the fruit mania. She only scarcely knew what they had tasted like. She had a sudden craving for sweetness, and stood to pluck some of the fruit. She popped a few in her mouth, and was underwhelmed by their flavor. But she noticed one scrawny limb of the tree where the fruits were dark and somewhat withered, and had an impulse to taste them – which was strange, of course, because most people not tend to want perished fruit. But as soon as her teeth pierced the skin, she tasted a tart, almost fiery flavor. She put some in her half-woven basket and brought them to her mother’s mate, who had also been an enthusiast for the special berries.”

“He was reluctant to taste them, as they appeared rotten and spoiled. But upon some prodding, he put one in his mouth. His eyes lit up as soon as he ate them. These were quite like the fruits from before. It was the rot that brought the magic back into them. They shared this with friends and with the shaman, but the people quickly discovered that it was not enough to let them rot on the branch – the first time they tried, they were met with a putrefying mess of fruit, wasting a whole year’s cull. It took them many seasons of experimentation to discover how to control the rot of the fruit, to make them turn into the magical fun-inciting fruit juice that some call brew, or barma.”

“Or booza,” someone hooted out.

“And that is why humans still love to drink the controlled-rot fruits. As we expanded across the land, we learned it wasn’t only the special fruits that could create the drink, but many plants, as long as they were mixed and stored right. Every people, as they spread out across generations, learned new techniques. But Doni reminded us that these brews take effort and patience to produce, like many of the Mother’s best gifts, and we cannot expect to have it if we just want to be fat and lazy all our lives,” Munavan snapped the somewhat more formal tone of storytelling by adding, “And I assure you, I love brew but I am not lazy, only fat.”

There were laughs, but less among the Losadunai than the Zelandonii. Munavan had again forgotten that the traveling had left him a little leaner.

Lisonia pleased the crowd by quickly divvying out a heavy waterbag full of red, fermented drink. The gathering drank with a little more appreciation than usual, reminded of the labour required to bring them the gift of inebriation.

Luzacam lightly tapped on the rigid, skin surface of a drum, making no particular pattern.

“It’s ready,” he said. The announcement was met with an ‘ _ooh’_ of excitement from the Losadunai acolyte, who had listened raptly to Luzacam’s talk of music since the moment he’d arrived. Luzacam, of course, hadn’t brought a cumbersome drum with him on his journey, so to demonstrate his technique he’d needed to start from scratch.

“So it’s basically like our drums,” Vodari said, turning the instrument over in his hands. “Though we tend to go shallower on the drum part itself.”

“I them about this high,” he says, vaguely indicating a height near the ground. “I use them sitting, kind of loosely between my knees. Some people prefer the handheld ones.”

“What do you use for the skin, generally?”

“The one I use back home is megaceros, and I find that one gives a deep resonance since it’s such a sturdy, but soft skin. But it’s costly, most people would rather not waste megaceros skin on drums unless it got damaged and had to be cut into smaller pieces. Smaller deer work fine, that’s what I used here.”

“Deer is generally what we use, I’ve heard of people using horse or bison but I feel like that wouldn’t be as durable.”

Luzacam laughed, “Wouldn’t last long the way I use it. Hey, Shude’, play a base beat.”

Munavan tapped an intricate melody on an oblong drum. While many people enjoyed rhythmic, single-tone drumming for ceremonial or festival purposes, those with a particular inclination for the instrument could create nuanced patterns of music, especially if they could form a band of people with similar skills. Depending on the region of the skin that was being tapped, the force of the percussion, and the material used for mallets – or lack of mallets altogether – the drum, an ostensibly primitive instrument, could have a broad, melodic range beyond the rhythm-keeping it role it often took in modern music.

Luzacam wove his part into Munavan’s. While the latter tapped his drum with the strong fingers of his meaty hands, Luzacam elected to use tapping sticks. He had made a variety over the past few years – some blunted with cattail fluff-filled leather pouches on the tips, some simply softened with leather covering, or some bare. The pair he used now showed a paradoxical mastering of his carving skill – they were nearly featureless, beyond the personal decorative symbol he’d drawn on the lower end, but were impressively straight, lightly tapered, and nearly identical to one another, which was essential to attaining a consistent sound. By now, Luzacam wasn’t sure if it was his desire to make music that forced him to improve his carving, or if it was his skill at carving that led him to music. It seemed the two wove together nicely, like a talent for gathering and a talent for cooking.

Vodari bobbed his head lightly, curls wiggling like dandelion fluff. Those Who Serve and their acolytes took particular interest in music – some used flutes or drums as their ‘voice’ to communicate with the spirit world, and many had a skill for singing, which they showed off when reciting the musical forms of common legends and prayers. Vodari’s Losaduna was not the most adept at music – he could drum very steadily for ceremonial reasons, but his singing voice was a flat baritone, and anything Vodari really knew about music, he’d learned from other Losadunai during summer meetings. Vodari did know good music though – it was as beautiful as bird song, as powerful as a rapid-torn river, but molded and mastered by the skills of man. It was another of those Mother’s Gifts that existed raw in nature, but demanded human taming.

Luzacam had caught the groove of the song, subtly transforming its tempo and sound. He had played music with Munavan often enough that they’d attained a certain synergy that co-musicians had – a mental communication that directed them towards a decent sound. He realized they were approaching the general rhythm of a lyrical song he’d thought of a few summers before, and with a snicker, he tried to evoke the lyrics in his mind. He began to sing in a voice somewhat thin and pebbly, but in tune.

“Beautiful girl, please come fill your cup. Beautiful girl, why aren’t I good enough?”

His two companions smiled too, for different reasons.

“You think I can see inside your head? You think I know the path towards your bed?”

He made a few small stumbles in his song, forgetting words he’d never had means of recording outside of his own mind.

“Want to throw together a Losadunai version of the song?” Luzacam asked, with a bit of jest.

Vodari began a bit tunelessly, and while the similarities between the languages made the first sentence sound quite melodic, they quickly discovered that a word in the second line counted twice as many syllables in Losadunai as in Zelandoni, leaving the melody staggered and cluttered with words. The three men laughed, took swigs from their drinking cups, and started over.

Kenalal swept away flint chips from his lap. He felt as though he’d made so many blades lately, one would need a Zelandoni to count them all. He was intent to finish his latest project, but he heard the tapping of drums from across a hide wall. He found himself so compelled to move to the melody, that he began inadvertently tapping his hammerstone to his flint nodule in rhythm, eventually cracking it in an unintended way. He muttered, and lowered his hands, defeated. As he tidied his work, he heard the singing in the next room transform into disagreement, and Luzacam’s voice, words somewhat indistinct, took on the tone of distaste he sometimes used on Munavan. He poked his head through the curtain of the area where he’d been working. Despite the late hour, much of the cave was well-lit from various fires. He heard squabbling in the dwelling where he’d heard music, and watched Vodari exit. The acolyte paid him no notice. Kenalal looked in the other direction and saw Darandar and Ronata stumbling around together, before pressing their bodies a little too closely together. He grimaced, and pulled his head back behind the curtain.

“May Doni help us before spring arrives,” he said to no one in particular. He pulled the stopper from a bag of green, bitter artemisia brew, and poured some into his mouth straight from the spout.


	16. Chapter 16

In a time where food and excitement could be sparse in the winter months, human beings had decided that an increase in both alcohol and pleasures would be essential to make the leaner months bearable. The alcoholic haze had been more powerful than ever now that they’d arrived in the land of the Losadunai – that grass-green brew of artemisia, with its nearly soap fennel aftertaste, was every bit as powerful as Denicol’s juniper brew. It could have been that festive compulsion in conjunction with the fog of alcohol that had led Ronata to this strange fixation she hadn’t felt since she’d first become a woman. She ran her fingers through the stiff, black hair of Darandar. It felt like wolf fur, not as silky as Nele’s hair or hers, and it was excitingly unique. She loved how his mouth always tasted so clean and minty, and promised to never tease him about his drying racks of mint leaves ever again. For the most part, they’d only kiss like this if they’d been drinking, and when she was clear-headed she tried to treat him like she always had – which was nonetheless uncharacteristic affection, for her. Yet she found herself drinking more that she once did, as if the artemisia was an excuse to access the delirious substance she craved _most –_ a sturdy, compact body, stiff hair, and an oddly compelling mouth.

Sometimes she’d stop for air and laugh raucously. “This is strange,” she said.

“Is it?” he inquired, a bit tender and a bit sincere.

“We have been friends for ten turnings of the seasons or more. And only now could I ever think of you in this way.”

He laughed, and not in the high, breathy way she knew and loved about him, but with a gentle heartbeat of air puffing through his nose. “I know.”

They leaned against each other in a slightly out-of-the-way area of the cave. There was silence for a moment. “I can’t do this, I can’t go any further with this,” Darandar began, and in a breath between clauses Ronata felt her heart throb uncomfortably, “Not unless Nele knows everything, and says it’s alright.”

Ronata smiled, discrete in the dim light.

“I wouldn’t forgive myself if I made things hard between you. I care about her, and you two love each other, probably better than anyone has loved me.”

“Then would you sleep off your drink beside me, if I promise to keep my hands to myself?”

His breath was growing regular and the flush of warm blood in his skin was cooling. “Yeah, that I can do.”

Nele was showing her beadwork to Lisonia and Vodari, explaining to them certain fine techniques she’d used. She had been collaborating with Lisonia to learn each other’s jewelery-making techniques, and had offered to make her two new friends custom necklaces as a gift for their hospitality.

“So there are many ways to make an emblem amulet, but the one I find easiest, at least, is to take a whittled disc of ivory and simply char it in a slow fire. You want it darkened, but not ready to splinter. When I was living south, I was taught many techniques to make ivory and bone in different colours. I had baskets of different clays – red and yellow ochre clay, and also a special clay that seemed reddish brown but could stain things green. I would bury my pieces in there for moons and they’d come out stained. “

She plucked a few morsels of browned ivory from the fire with firestone tongs. “So we let them cool, and with a superfine flint awl, we can carve the emblem. Get Kenalal to offer you some of those as a parting gift. He’s very good at making them.”

“I don’t use stone awls,” Lisonia said, “They are so fragile. I do my sewing with porcupine quills.”

Nele moved the cooling ivory ovals around. “They are rather practical for embroidery, but they aren’t strong enough to carve into ivory.”

“Do you learn a lot about your crafts when you travel, Nele? You can’t be just walking all day.” Lisonia enquired, filling time while they waited for the ivory to be cool to handle.

“We only walk for about a third or a half of the sun’s path in the sky, unless it’s particularly easy terrain or we have a particular place in mind. When you’re traveling, you don’t have access to any masters at your craft, unless you’re lucky enough to be one yourself. And at our age, we can’t really call ourselves masters yet, though I would say Ronata’s cooking and Kenalal’s flintknapping are exceptional, probably better than most people ten years older than them.”

“Luzacam and Munavan are also great at music,” Vodari provided, “I think that’s one of those skills that are mastered best by younger people, actually. You have too much experience, too many children at your hearth, and you become bound to tradition. Music is a skill tethered only to innovation.”

Lisonia rolled her eyes, belying a loving smile on her lips. Vodari could add esoteric magician-talk to even the most grounded of topics.

“But it’s a good thing,” Nele continued on her previous point, “Because without masters, you’re right, you need to figure things out on your own. Innovate. And on top of that, without having anyone to help you ascend on your own skill branch, you feel like learning more of your friend’s skills – branching out. So I’ve actually learned more about beadwork and all that from watching Luzacam carve, or watching Darandar make wooden spears.”

As she spoke, she pulled more materials from a pouch, including cockles, water-worn pieces of mussel, and a few pieces of amber, though her largest pieces she kept in her pack. “I’ve even needed to learn a few things about healing from my mother and brother before I left, because we do not have anyone trained in healing or in spirit work in our group. We’ve been lucky so far, but it would be nice if one of us knew a little more.”

She picked up the ivory amulets, cool at last. “So I use the sharp tip to scrape through the superficial dark layer, and the white from the inside shows. See?” She dug a shallow trench in the tab of ivory, little bigger than a human eye. “My personal emblem.”

Vodari suddenly felt the urge to ask Nele if she’d changed her emblem when she’d changed her name. As an acolyte, he was far more familiar with abalons – emblems that served as a symbolic signature to many people - than the average person. He stopped himself from mentioning it, though, as he was unsure how much of her story she had shared with Lisonia, and Those Who Served knew better than to share certain secrets, even with their mates. Instead, he picked up a piece of ivory and attempted to do the same. The line he carved was wiggly and unstable.

The two women smiled at him, as Nele proceeded. “Then we can use a slightly thicker awl to pierce a hole, for the thong.” She did this effortlessly, but Vodari’s attempt ended with a broken awl.

Nele heard a scratch at the curtain, and rose to her feet while her companions worked on piercing beads, Lisonia encountering more success. _If there’s any evidence I am fully a woman inside,_ she thought as she strode to open the curtain, _it’s that men are just not good at beadwork._

Ronata shuffled her feet demurely when Nele met her at the door.

“Are you with others?” she asked.

“Vodari and Lisonia are in here learning about beads. It feels so great to be the master at something, for once! I feel like a baby half the time when I travel with you guys,” she said with an exaggerated pout.

“There’s something I want you to know.”

Nele detected an intensity in her tone, and let the curtain close behind her. She shuffled into a slightly more reclusive nearby section of the cave. Nele looked at her partner expectantly.

“Remember that evening when I came back from getting fruit, and I told you that I’d kissed Darandar?”

Nele grinned. She hadn’t expected to be happy at the news, but somehow it shot a sharp twinge of excitement through her heart to think of her beloved getting such a special token from Darandar, of all people. “I was only surprised it hadn’t happened sooner.”

“Well, surprise surprise, it has happened since. Before you ask, no, we have not shared pleasures. I needed to make sure you and I were standing on the same ground about this. He is my friend, and I love him, but you are the one I want to join myself with, and I don’t aim to get you jealous. I will stop if you demand it.”

Nele abruptly grabbed Ronata and pulled her in for a tight, ardent kiss. Even she was shocked by the warm blood flooding the skin of her face and making her insides bubble and steam like the hot pools of the Losadunai. While it was acceptable and even common to share extramarital pleasures, especially in the context of inebriated festivals, it wasn’t so often that a partner would be excited by the prospect. Unless, of course, they were seeking a triad mating.

“Is that you telling me you’re not upset?”

“I would love to find out if the rumours are true,” Nele said with a devious grin. “If you aren’t busy this afternoon, you can practice your skills with me. You would need to impress him, after all. He only just recently broke up with his mate.”

Ronata’s eyebrows raised at the overt invitation, and she made a mental note of it. Only when Nele walked away from her did she realize the implications of the first line of her statement.

While Nele had left them to themselves to fashion beads, Lisonia spoke to Vodari:

“I was annoyed at first when you brought all these visitors to live right next to our hearth. I really thought we’d spend our first winter as mates spending more time just the two of us.”

She watched him drop a small nodule of bead material, and fumble as it rolled away. She giggled, and added coyly, “Maybe even enough time together to be blessed.”

Vodari gave up on retrieving the bead. He directed his attention to the woman.

“But now, I am glad they came. It’s really made winter more interesting. And I like Nele, I’m glad she’s sharing her skills with us.”

“I really believe Nele is favoured by Duna.” Vodari provided.

Lisonia’s face darkened. “Like, she’s blessed?” She was a bit bewildered; she didn’t mind that her mate was talking spirits with this foreign woman, but it would be unfair if he’d spent so much time with her that his spirit had been chosen for her child – before Lisonia was ever given a child of her mate’s spirit!

“No, she can’t-“ he cut himself off, again reluctant reveal too much, “Not blessed. Favoured. She is, in some ways, a spirit-image of the Mother.”

Lisonia took on a skeptical look. Saying someone was the image of the mother was sometimes a backhanded compliment – it could be taken to mean they were fat like Dunai statues.

“If I were a full Losaduna, I would take her as an acolyte.”

“Well you’re an acolyte yourself. It’s a bit soon to think of acolytes, it’s like thinking of grandchildren when you have no children. And besides, she won’t want to stay here forever.”

“I know she wouldn’t….” Vodari trailed off, picking up Nele’s ivory emblem off the ground and twirling it in his hands. He wouldn’t stop her from following her friends on their journey, but he wondered if it were in any way possible to plant seeds in her mind this winter, the kind that would make her want to discover more when she stopped by on her return trip. He couldn’t quite put a finger on what it was in her that called to him.

Nele took a deep sniff of the steaming, grey-brown watery decoction in her hands. It had that same dull, fungal smell, like dry loam and the bracket fungi on old trees. A primal smell, dirtier than life but cleaner than rot. Vodari sat across from her, wearing his full selection of amulets over a loose, comfortable tunic.

“I have convened with my Losaduna and we have decided to take you with us on a spirit journey.” He gestured to the Losaduna, who preferred to speak in his native tongue for precision. Nele, while not fluent, knew enough to follow along.

“Nele, woman of the Zelandoni, my acolyte tells me you have been favoured by Duna. Being favoured brings many blessings, but many burdens. You have been given a material form that takes on parts of both man and woman; while it makes you apart from most people, it makes you closer to the completeness of a spirit. We have decided to open your mind with sacred magic. You will gain awareness of creation that you haven’t before had, but what you see is up to your own mind and the will of the Mother. “

Nele shivered despite the hot tea she held in her hands. Vodari rose to let Luzacam into the room.

“Luzacam has a talent with the drums,” Vodari explained. “We asked him to keep a rhythm for us to follow so we can find our way home, if we slip too far into the spirit world.”

There was a time long ago where Nele would have had no fear of slipping into the spirit world forever; the idea of becoming incorporeal would have appealed to her back then. To be spirit, formless, moving undetected across the earth, would have lessened the burden of living. In the past year, however, the deepening connections of kinship she’d gained with her friends made her cling to hear earthly life in ways she’d never known; she wanted love, she wanted family. She wanted to live. She hoped that such a deeper desire would be enough to keep her safe on a spirit journey. More than anything, she trusted Vodari. Even though she’d grown fond of all her traveling party, they had been Ronata’s friends first. Vodari was the first person she’d known to really feel like _her_ friend, someone who actually wanted her around not just as an accessory to the group, but as a companion, a confidante. She trusted him. She knew if he had come back from such journeys, he wouldn’t let her go alone, and he wouldn’t let her lose her way.

Losaduna gave a brief incantation to thank the earth for producing magical fungus, and to ask the Mother for guidance through their trip. Luzacam began to tap the drum, at roughly the rhythm that matched Nele’s heartbeat, but just staggered enough to give her an anxious edge. On the cue of Losaduna and his acolyte, Nele drank the tea down. It had cooled enough to be chugged quickly without burning the throat.

They waited. The tea took a while to have its full effect. Losaduna continued his incantations, in Losadunai, and Nele didn’t fully understand his words anymore. The fire was but a flicker; enough for Luzacam to see his drum and for the three spirt travelers to know the difference between what they saw with their eyes open and what they saw with their eyes shut.

She relaxed into her seat and closed her eyes. She could somehow hear the sound of snowflakes tapping on the side of the cave, as imperceptible as flies zooming through the air on fragile wings. She felt the tap of Luzacam’s drum like a heartbeat, and her own had slowed enough to match it. Every pop from the fire shot vision in her blackened mind, like the circular ripples on a pond but painted sun-orange. Every breath from her companions was shot with glitter, and the unseen particles of moist breath evoked in her mind the droplets that accumulated and fell across the generations in the steamy hot spring caverns. Fixated on the vision of moist, sulfur-scented stalagmites, she soon found herself somewhere far away.


	17. Chapter 17

From the crawling of her skin Nele knew she was in a constant state of renewal and growth, like stalagmites. Every drip of her own sweat slid down her pale forearms like condensation in a cave, dragging with it unnoticeable fragments of skin and hair. Like spring sprouts, seeded and rising, the thin, faint hairs on her body erupted from the soil of her flesh.

She teetered on a moment of clarity, of clear-headedness telling her the tea had taken full effect. The faint pounding of Luzacam’s drum, synched to her heartbeat, seemed like the motor of her bloodflow. With every resonant pound, she felt her heart clench, and the warm life-giving fluid follow its rivers and streams to its extremities. She lost her hesitation, and followed the sensation of the blood in her veins.

She felt her breath like geyser steam and followed her mind’s path of red, heavy-walled veins. These were not the veins of mortal man, but the veins of the Great Mother, glowing in a warning. Her blood fed the warmth of the hot springs; the water of Her womb healing these people, smaller to Her than the first kindling of baby is small to its host mother. She bled from cuts in the earth; from the tall, foul-smelling cysts of mountain and from the inflamed cracks in dry steppe skin. The blood scabbed to land; the stone scabbed to flesh.

The veins showed through weak skin; berry-coloured spiders in the limbs of the elderly. The Mother, ever youthful, could heal even her old age; pouring over the flesh of earth as one sprinkled charcoal in the mire of waste trenches. Filth, rot, renewal. Nele could still feel her flesh, faintly, focused more on the interplay of sensations. Before she’d seen only the activity of the slow-living stone, but now in the dimness, her minimal visual input took on more expansive meaning.

She followed the rivers of liquid stone, beneath the earth like a heartbeat. They bled into water to feed monsters unknown; the ancestor spirits left behind by man. They bled into sky to choke the creatures the Mother has reclaimed, Her loneliness before creating woman and man extending so far into time that the veins fed far different flesh.

She followed the rivers of liquid stone, south to a land of no winter, shattered by trenches, scars even the mother could not heal. Did the mother have a heart, somewhere deep inside the earth? Is that what pumped the blood?

She followed the rivers of liquid stone once more, smothered deep under glaciers, some veins bubbling under the surface like bruises, piercing through the shield of ice. The mountains coughed their pneumatic grey smoke; the blood and ice formed glassy blisters on the land. Somewhere south, across the waters, the mother was heaving black breath like a signal fire, calling in an esoteric sequence, _come home._

Nele followed the call of the smoke, flying further afield from her conscious mind, who stood behind and bellowed, pleading, that this mustn’t be _the_ call. Steep cliffs and blue-green seas unfamiliar to the traveler. Trees sprouting in all shades from green to orange; waters squirming with hard-shelled critters and wriggling star-armed scavenger beasts. Barnacles and mussels suckling the stone, displayed as living jewelry. Cliffs populated with nests, sea-birds filling their mouths with saltwater slime, returning home to guard pearly white eggs.

Nele’s conscious mind caught up to her on a southern wind and delivered by hand a memory woven tightly with a vision. She stood on the cliff, a Cave for seabirds, and a dark-haired man opened a pouch.

“More eggs,” Darandar said to her, voice watery like a dream.

In a slow trickle of movement, the ghost of her hand haunting each of its previous locations, she pulled an egg from the pouch he presented her. “The egg is the most perfect of the Mother’s creations,” her voice announced, though she felt no rumble in the folds of her throat.

Her living body laughed, noticed only by the drumming Luzacam.

“The egg is the center of creation. The Mother is as much Egg as Woman,” her dream-voice continued.

“And who are we?” his voice inquires, “Ants on a cracked shell?”

Nele looked down at the egg in her hand, cracking like the earth before the volcanic blood spilled. She stared idly as the shell ruptured, but what exited was no seabird. She felt the crawl of ants on her wrist, on her arm, on her skin, on every hair that sprouted like shoots from the soil of her flesh. Her vocal cords still felt nothing as she tried to scream, but her fingers clenched the egg in an unforgiving death grip.

Amidst her gasps she heard the heartbeat of Luzacam’s drum, and stilled to follow it. Her skin still wriggling from a verminous stampede, a hybrid of feeling and seeing Vodari nearby washed over her. He greeted her and calmed her, in another call of _come home._

**“** How is it happening yet again that you wake up to my concerned face?” Ronata chided as soon as Nele opened her eyes.

Nele felt fingers in her dark curls and a kiss on her smooth forehead. She let out a groan.

“I feel like a field that’s been trampled by a bison herd,” she groaned.

“In the sense that you’re flattened by hooves, that you’re depleted of grass, or that you’re covered in waste?”

Nele groaned again, long and indulgently. “All three.” Her lips contracted into a tight squiggle on her face.

“I’m assuming whatever you were doing with Vodari last night left you with a pretty big case of morning-after sickness. Are you ready for some food?”

Nele had skipped dinner the previous night for myriad reasons: nerves, a sense of ceremony, and the practicality of having the special tea digest quicker. She felt a cavern open in her gut when Ronata mentioned food – unlike the hangover of alcohol, which produced an unstable stomach and could even result in vomiting, the hangover from the mushroom drink was more a general exhaustion, a depletion of the creative energy used to conjure the visions. Those Who Serve would explain that the soul traveling on a spirit journey was tiring in the same way that the body tired on a physical journey. In more realistic terms, the special ingredients caused a surge of serotonin in the consumer’s body, and what followed was temporary depletion.

“I am starving.”   
“You slept late. The sun is directly overhead.”

As Ronata left the dwelling to prepare some food, Vodari entered. His wiry dandelion curls were in disarray.

“How was your journey? You seemed very peaceful, and Luzacam says you even laughed for a while, but towards the end you started thrashing around and murmuring. We sent for Darandar and Ronata and they put you to bed; I think they soothed you a bit. Luzacam tried his best but we told him before that the most important thing was to keep drumming so you’d have your focus.”

Nele stretched out and her joints, held in a fetal position the better part of the day, popped audibly. She sat up, noticing she was still in yesterday’s clothes with just her necklace removed and placed beside her. “That was…really scary and really fun. Do Losaduna really do things like that all the time?”

Vodari chuckled. “I do it more than most, honestly. As you can feel right now, it really knocks you down. You don’t want to be doing it too much if you’re the only magician of your cave, because you need to be available if people need you. But yes, we do.”

“I want to go again. Is it allowed for normal people?”

“Yes, but they may come out realizing they aren’t as normal as they thought.” There was a humour to Vodari’s wording, but the implication was rather serious. The inclination to magic was usually felt as an interest to a select few, but some people seemed to have a psychology that made them more adept at it. Nele knew of the ‘call’, the idea that an acolyte wasn’t truly a magician until they’d experienced a particular call. She worried for a moment that the call in her vision was _the_ call, but she remembered that most calling journeys lasted much longer than the single evening she’d been out. Vodari spoke again, “So what did you see?”

Nele recounted for him her adventure. She didn’t leave out the parts about being called to the mountain, though she tried not to place undue importance on them. She remained rather focused on the unpleasant ending.

“Why do you think you saw these things?”

“When I was a child I fell into an ant hill. It was very traumatic. My mother’s mate threw me in a cold river to wash them off, but they’d bitten me. I hate ants. The egg though, I just found it funny. I remember making eggs for Darandar, which was a good time.”

Vodari started babbling about visions and their meaning, but he barely paid attention to his own words, having a simultaneous dialogue with himself about the value of her vision. He’d meditate on it.

Ronata returned carrying an antler platter, and Darandar was behind her holding a teacup.

“Rosehip tea,” she said, as the man handed Nele the cup. “Lisonia said it’s good for recovery because it’s good for winter.”

In a land far from citrus, and where fruits were hard to come by in winter, rose tea was a beloved and lifesaving beverage. Even those who didn’t adore the flavor would eat the occasional bud or dried petal – there was a magic in them that kept skin healthy, without which one’s gums could become tender or even bloody. The collagen-fueling tea was essential for healing skin and connective tissue, but some said it helped their minds regain focus after excessive drink, vision trips, or even a mundane cold or flu.

Nele sipped it gently. The floral aroma reminded her of summer. Ronata placed the plate on her lap. “Meals in bed. How luxurious,” she joked.

The smooth section of elk antler was stacked with strips of preserved meat, boiled to soften and desalinate, and fried back to life. There were moist little cakes of grain, essentially gruel formed into patties and baked again, smeared with a sweet compote of pectin-rich apples preserved with more rose petals, giving more of its healing magic and creating a pleasant uniting element between the drink and the food. Finally, Nele stared at the wiggly, sun-yellow center of a fried dove egg. For a moment, her heart flushed with amalgamated emotions. She picked up an eating knife and dug in.

“The egg,” she said, as the pierced yolk flooded her plate like lava spilling from a mountain, “is the most perfect of the Mother’s creations.”

Vodari sat in the steamy cavern where he’d first conversed with Nele about two moons before. He had braved snow to get here, and the opening was slightly covered over by drift. That drift ended up being more boon than bane – it kept the warmth of the steamy pools within the cavern, and he could comfortably remove his outer parka once inside. Vodari spent a great deal of his life amidst the cloudy buzz of a slew of herbal teas, but this time he sought to meditate in a state of complete clear-headedness. It was the early afternoon, and he was alert.

He’d been interested in the story Nele had woven about her journey, and was particularly taken by her statement about the egg. Those Who Served had long pondered the meaning of the egg, knowing the Mother had given many of her creatures like birds and fish their blessings in that form, rather than the internal pregnancy of mammals and woman. While the triangle was considered the sacred shape of the Mother in popular knowledge, the circle also had its own divine value. Some considered it to be a primordial form – the circle as First, the triangle as Perfection. The sun and the moon were round, for example, and they were among the earliest elements of creation. And it seemed as though the circular eggs were given to creatures that demonstrated a lower level of the divine knowledge of which humans had the most – mammoths were smarter than frogs; lynx were smarter than trout. Humans embraced the evolved, triangular shape in their reproduction. It wasn’t only in the triangular pubic area that was commonly associated with the sexual characteristics of the Mother, either. The average person who butchered animals for food had a vague knowledge of the internal organs that differed between males and females, but only those who studied as healers tended to understand that the two ovaries and the womb had their own triangular shape, and that took root in a far deeper magic than the gift of Pleasure that the outsides provided. Perhaps that was connected in some way to the fact that males had circular forms in their external organs, and rather little on the inside.

He felt a bit dirty to think of it, but he suddenly began to wonder if Nele had inside parts like a woman, like a man, or a mix of both. He supposed he’d never know -perhaps even she wasn’t sure - but since she claimed to never have a Moontime, it was unlikely that she had a womb. He felt dirtier still when his impulse was to consider this a positive, as having children could make it harder to dedicate oneself to service. Then again, he wondered also if her spirit was able to be given to women. The only other female in her traveling party was Ronata, and as close as they were, she had never spoken of being blessed before. But then, Ronata had yet to be impregnated by any of other friend’s spirits, either, and she spent about as much time with any of them. Maybe it was she who had something misshapen inside, or maybe the Mother had a plan for her that didn’t involve children, or at least, not yet.

Vodari shook his head to get back on track. Yet, he considered, the very fact that Nele’s words could send him on such a mental tangent was a testament to their wisdom, as little as she may be aware of it. He figured that with the great distance her group needed to travel, and the relative warmth of the wooded areas that would make up the next leg, they wouldn’t wait for the full bloom of spring to leave. They’d leave as soon as it was dry and warm enough to comfortably stay outside, especially since they were on the westmost edge of Losadunai territory and could probably camp with other caves for the first few moon-phases of their journey. That gave him a moon, two at most, to coax something more from here. Would it be enough? Could he at least impress upon Losaduna her value?

Perhaps he’d give her a token offer to stay, nothing pressing. Or he’d ask her to stay when they were on their return trip. He could allow Ronata to stay too, so she wouldn’t get lonely. But Nele could refuse, or worse, she could decide to settle down somewhere on her journey and never come home at all.

Then he had to turn to his own visions from the ceremony he’d had with her. At the time they’d seemed mundane: general floating above the scenery, the way one would meditate before a hunt to find a herd. There was no veiled language or esoteric symbolism, only visions of cliffs and woods and cawing seabirds. When Nele described her vision, he had realized how similar that scenery was, though he couldn’t evoke any memories of having been there in his waking life. It was an unknown world. It was sensible to imagine a foreign place when planning a long journey. Perhaps it was a land she’d encounter on her travels, which made it all the more important she come back, at least for a while, on her return trip.

Then realized with a squirm of bile that perhaps it wasn’t _Nele_ who was calling him. He sped through his visions again – mountains, oceans, mollusc-cluttered cliffsides, and haunting monoliths eroded by wind and saltwater. No, it was nothing like home; nothing that he’d ever known in life. This was a vision sent from far further afield than Vodari had ever been. Why did he share this omen with _Nele_ though?

He fragmented each symbol that had been evoked to him: birds mean voyaging, eggs mean life, the ocean surrounds the world in a ring, representing the womb-waters of the Mother. Then what? His heart stirred again. What if Vodari hadn’t been placed in Nele’s path for _her_ sake, but she’d been placed in _his?_ His mind calculated the possibilities of the future and left him with just one statement spoken out loud.

“Lisonia isn’t going to have any of it.”


	18. Chapter 18

“I need to talk to her soon, Lisonia,” Vodari said. “It went better than I expected.”

“It seems you don’t do much _but_ talk to her,” Lisonia responded, smiling to show it wasn’t envy fueling her words.

Vodari’s body took on an uncharacteristic stillness to put in evidence the seriousness of his words. “I can ask her to stay, but she will say no. Though I believe she is inclined to magic – she says her mother and brother are both adept at healing – I don’t think that’s where her priorities lie. I think what she showed me meant…more. It wasn’t just about her.”

Lisonia looked up from her sewing to listen to him undistracted. 

“I could go with her.”

She breathed in deeply and slowly, not allowing a gasp.

“Our visions matched, Lis, and that means something. Whatever is calling her on her journey seems to be reaching me, too. How many people had to meet for us to have been put on the same path, at the same time like this? How will I know if I let them leave so soon?”

She shoved her sewing from her lap and stood. “How do you expect me to feel when you announce to me, in our first year of mating, that you want to leave to go to the ends of Duna’s creation, with another woman? You go off to your caves and drink these…mélanges! And come back babbling about a body without organs. And now you wish to set off on adventure, like an unmated man? How do you expect me to react?”

Vodari tried to keep his composure. “I only expect you to listen.”

Lisonia put her head in her hands. It took a long time for her to start speaking again. “I knew it when I accepted to join with you, that being the mate of an acolyte, even one who never ascends rank, is different than being mated to any other person. You juggle a lot to keep your hearth running, and you watch your mate run off to things you can’t even understand. And even if you can’t follow them everywhere they go in the spirit world, you try your best to follow them on earth.”

“And that is why I would ask you to join me. Because you are my mate.”

Lisonia’s expression knotted in conflict.

“I am not Losaduna’s only acolyte,” he continued, “and I am not even his oldest. You knew when you mated me that the status of a great Losaduna would not be mine if I was contented to sit at his hearth and smoke things or brew things or chew things. Not everything in the Service of the Mother is what exists in our head when we drink mushrooms or roots. So much of it is _out there_.”

Lisonia sat silent for a long time, tending to her sewing. Somewhere under the surface, she felt herself bubbling with discontent, like a steaming hot-pool. She didn’t dare to look at Vodari, fearing she’d be compelled to drag him by the curls, or - nearly as frightening - that his silly apple-cheeked smile would incapacitate the anger she wanted to feel – the same way it always did.

She didn’t speak a word until an entire tunic had come together. It was too big for her body, and of a masculine cut. Vodari was absent-mindedly sipping a cup of tea when he was startled by his mate’s voice.

“We will stop at The Cave of Twin Streams, then, to tell my brothers that we may not be at the Summer Meeting this year.”

Spring came forth with the indecisive arbitrariness with which autumn had left the land at the end of the year. The snow, often thick in the nearby forests and hills, melted in rushes and trickles, and returned in sheets the very next day. The proximity to geothermal heat sources could deceive the human residents into thinking spring warmth was nearer than it was, especially when hot patches of earth occasionally melted the ice on their surface and let premature flowers take root only to be killed by the next frost. With one foot in winter and one in spring, the earth continued with its deceptive, cryptic hints for so long that the group grew restless.

There came a morning when Kenalal, unusually hyperactive, stormed into the morning meal with a stick in his hand.

“Guess what, folks?” he said, perturbing in his excitement. He didn’t await an answer, and presented his stick with melodramatic gestures that evoked a storyteller. “One hundred and eleven.”

Munavan gave his knee a showy slap. “Kenalal, you really would make a good leader. Look at you, counting past a hundred.”

“That is how many days we’ve been here. And I think we will only count two more, if you can be ready, for today, I have seen…” he paused dramatically, “A worm.”

The news was not met with the excited scrambling he had expected. His friends slowly poured over their meal and meandered to their guest hearth to ponder their packing.

The days were only a few scant moments shorter than the nights when the party of eight set out. With two Losadunai natives now joining the group, their travel across the territory would be quite simple and well-rehearsed. A series of steam clouds from various hot springs of the region guided their path in a wispy corridor.

With the sudden switch to hours of walking after moons of relative immobility and winter laziness, everyone struggled to regain their pace when they started out. Lisonia was particularly slow to gain her traveling legs, as the shortest member of the team, and one of the least-practiced travelers of the lot. At first, she spent much of her time trailing at the back of the pack. On the second morning of the trek, she barely wanted to leave her sleeping roll – every muscle in her legs, particularly in her ankles, screamed in revolt.

By the third day she no longer found herself trailing at the back. She felt the pain in her legs begin to rattle loose until her legs had a limber, rubbery quality about them that only hurt if she tried to sit cross-legged during meal breaks.

At night, when she felt as though she was a skin stretched on a drying rack, she’d sometimes console herself with the reminder that their first stop was the Cave of her two elder brothers. If she decided, between now and then, that following Vodari to the ends of the earth was a foolish endeavor, she could easily make it into a family visit and return home. She didn’t tell herself – or at least, she tried not to notice the thought when it arose – that it wasn’t likely she’d convince Vodari to come back with her. She’d need to spend a year without her mate.

While her conscious mind knew that Vodari was earnest in wanting his mate with him anywhere he went, she couldn’t help but feel that the team of traveling men just wanted a motherlike presence to tag along and care for them. In terms of women, they had Nele, but she was more of a little sister than a mother. And other than cooking and very conspicuously sharing pleasures with not one but two of her companions from time to time, Ronata was the kind of person that Lisonia was almost willing to forget was female. The overall attitude of the party was raucous and silly like a men’s lodge at a summer gathering, and much like her traveling legs, she gained a taste for this very slowly.

When evenings came and she savored the food Ronata made, and indulged in the meagre but sufficient comforts of the camp, however, she understood she wasn’t truly _needed,_ for better or for worse. If she wanted to look at the situation as a pessimist, she was here only for Vodari. But a more confident voice told her she was here as a friend.

With every day, she walked nearer to the centre of the traveling party. She pointed out for them the flatter lands, crisscrossed by tributaries, indicating their proximity to the Cave of the Twin Streams.

“One more day and we will be there,” she announced, “I remember camping in this area, when my brothers would go on hunts.”

“Do you come from here, then?” Kenalal asked her.

“No,” she replied, “My brothers are a good ten years older than me. They went off to live with their mates.”

“Oh, I figured since Vodari was an acolyte you’d left your hearth to come to his,” the man said.

“No, I lived at the hearth of my mother and her mate. She died around the time I became a woman.”

“I’m sorry,” Kenalal said simply. There was a horrible pity assigned to a woman who’d lost her mother before ever becoming a mother herself, for even a well-studied healer didn’t have the comfortable rapport and firsthand knowledge of birth that one’s own mother did. 

In a pregnant silence, Ronata interjected on a different topic.

“How long as it been since we’ve seen Nele and Vodari?”

Kenalal paused to look behind him. Munavan, Luzacam, and Darandar were walking in a cluster not too far behind them, within conversing distance. The odd pair were so far behind that they couldn’t be seen through the brush.

“Probably getting eating by hyenas,” Kenalal stated dryly.

“You think we should wait for them?” Lisonia asked, with only the barest hint of concern.

“Maybe next time we stop for a drink,” Kenalal suggested.

Ronata scooted nearer to Lisonia. “I feel as though you and I have an understanding that others don’t have.” Lisonia’s brow furrowed.

Ronata continued: “Our mates are cut from the same hide. It seems as though they never run out of things to talk about.”

Lisonia smiled, “So Nele is your mate now, is she?”

Ronata’s made a smile to match, “Well, soon enough. Maybe after this journeying thing is through. But sometimes I feel less like partners and more like – well, I think maybe you understand – I feel as though you and me are mothers who have left their children together to entertain each other. People with an inclination to Service are so smart, and yet some can barely wield a weapon or roast a haunch!”

Lisonia laughed, “Yes, they definitely entertain themselves. Very useful if we needed to get something done for which we wanted them out of the way.”

“Does he do this thing where he decides to tell you all his thoughts, expecting you to agree with whatever nonsense he said? And either you do agree, and he keeps adding more until you get to a part you disagree with, or you don’t agree, he skips straight to being mad?”

“Oh, Duna, _absolutely,”_ Lisonia exclaimed. Though she’d spoken to Ronata a little less often than many of her friends, she felt profoundly understood by the other person in this moment. “He will go on talkdownpours and then if you ask him if he’s ready for dinner he won’t even hear the question.”

Ronata noticed that despite her improvement in communication, Lisonia still used a few borrowed words, sometimes coarsely reassembled into their Zelandonii equivalent. She actually found it quite charming and hoped the habit would never fully go away. A few of the words, she thought, actually rendered a more vivid meaning than their ‘real’ Zelandonii translations. “Nele says ‘yes’ in this clipped tone that makes it clear to me she didn’t actually listen to the question, so I ask it again.”

The group paused on a series of high, rounded rocks to take languid, refreshing swigs from their waterbags, and soon they heard the murmuring of two distant voices, and subsequently saw the distinctive wiggle of Vodari’s curly hair.

“Do you ever feel like you want to get annoyed by his tirades, but you see his curls dancing around in his excitement, and you just can’t be upset? That’s how I feel when I see her beautiful face, lighting up about her latest obsession.”

“Yes, I know exactly what you mean. The things we find annoying and the things we find cute are sometimes much intertwined.”

“I wouldn’t change it.” Ronata said wistfully. “Besides,” she looked askew at Darandar, waving his arms wildly after squeezing his waterbag too hard and soaking himself, “I think if I tried to find something new, I’d always keep going for the next biggest fool.”

They arrived at the Cave of the Twin Streams in the evening of the fourth walking day. Lisonia hurried forward to greet her brothers before getting bogged down in the introductions of every new party member. Fortunately, after their winter with the Losadunai, all members of the group had a good enough grasp on the language to handle their own niceties.

“Denari,” she said, eyes finally landing on a man whose curiosity drew him out of his hearth.

“What are you doing here so early in the season?” he exclaimed, clasping her forearms in greeting.

“It’s a long story, one we can tell over dinner. I brought a plum wine brew just for you,” she said warmly, knowing her brother and his mate were fond of the drink.

“And how’s Thamelia?” she said, as a woman came out from behind the curtain. She carried with her a baby about half a year old, who was born at the very end of the previous year’s summer meeting. Some women who were very late in their pregnancies elected to stay home if they predicted they’d give birth at the meeting, but some loved the attention they’d get from introducing their baby to even their most distant friends and family. “She has grown, she seems so alert now!”

The Cave was soon a bustle of activity, its inhabitants ecstatic to be freed from their winter boredom sooner than expected. Lisonia and Vodari did their fair share of catching up, and the others made themselves comfortable. Kenalal finally found a use for some of the flint tools he’d made over winter – some of the ones he’d originally intended to give to Lisonia and Vodari as a parting gift instead became tokens of well-wishes for their temporary hosts. Unwilling to be idle guests, they also contributed to the cooking of an evening meal, providing a few of the rare, new green plants they’d collected on their way, and the Losadunai returned the offer by clearing some of their leftover dried winter meat, which they wouldn’t need much longer, so the travelers could confection a few new traveling cakes.

The populace at this Cave was a bit younger than that of Vodari and Lisonia’s home, which counted few children. The travelers indulged the youngsters who prodded at them and asked them questions, knowing well it could be the last they’d see of children for a very long time. They occasionally exaggerated aspects of the summary of their adventure so far, in ways that left the children wide-eyed but were interpreted as obvious jokes from the adults. Lisonia felt a flush of tenderness when she saw her brother’s older daughter, around five, crawl into Vodari’s lap and reach for a springy curl like it was a berry on a branch.

When the night wore on and traveler and resident alike retreated to their sleeping place, Lisonia took a temporary place in Denari’s lodge. She fell asleep with the murmuring of voices, the babbling of babies, and the crackling of fire surrounding her. _I’ll miss the busy feeling of a whole Cave,_ she thought. There was a safety and comfort of being in a community. But for the first time since she departed, she felt a genuine excitement for the trail ahead of her, and to have her own little community of her mate and new friends. Someday, she would be able to recount such fantastical stories to children of her own, maybe children with bushes of curly, light hair.


	19. Chapter 19

Kenalal waited impatiently for his friends to gather around. He had insisted with Munavan that they reconvene their path before setting out into the unknown, and the Losadunai summer outpost they currently occupied would be the ideal location to settle their plan.

He set down a flat plane of Megaceros antler in the centre of his group. Over the course of the winter, Kenalal had done thorough research. He had sought out just about every person at the Losadunai Cave who had made a journey, however short or long, to piece together their knowledge. In a world with no written word, no legal national borders, and no official terrain maps, the knowledge of what to expect on a journey existed only in the minds of those pioneers who braved it, and accumulating the knowledge second-hand was no small task. He had spent many mornings replaying the knowledge gained the previous evening, while absently knapping flint. Perhaps the ritual contributed to the fact that even after handing out blades for the most meager of favours, he still had so many that he barely wanted to carry them all.

Ronata and Luzacam, having better skills at drawing and at giving the intangible some form, had helped him craft the material map, though it was mostly Kenalal who had provided the knowledge. He presented his findings to his seven companions, who stared down at the platter, some munching traveling cakes during the presentation.

“So now,” he said, “We are at a summer outpost that I was told is the easternmost semi-permanent dwelling of the Losadunai. To the north of here, there is another glacier, a fairly small one, but if we stick to the southern ridge, we will be clear of the mountain ranges in, say eight to ten days walking if we make a good pace.”

“We should spend a day or two here,” Luzacam offered, “There’s a lot of woods and we could collect some last-minute provisions, before we exit the mountain ranges. I assume it’s just plains after that.”

“Besides,” Vodari said, “We have well-constructed lodges here, and I think we’d all enjoy getting a few last sleeps in here before we have to camp on the ground for Duna knows how long.”

Kenalal nodded in agreement. “Now the next segment we will generally still be following the River, and as far as I know it will be a very long time before we meet any other people.”

“The S’Armunai, what about them?” Munavan asked.

“I received a few conflicting comments on that,” Kenalal said.

“Kavaroa said they were high north, almost near where the Mammoth graze,” Lisonia contributed.

“Ronata’s the one who knows maps the best, what do you think?”

Ronata considered the vague blobs on the proto-map. “They have got to be quite a distance out of our way. If they’re living in the north lowlands but they are still before the Mother meets the Sister, then, oh it would probably take an entire moon, round trip, to get there and back, at least to make it to the heart of their territory.”

“So I definitely wouldn’t bother up there unless we thought we needed them for winter shelter, which is definitely not going to happen as we’re barely into spring,” Kenalal resumed. “The closer we stay to the River, the easier it will be to keep track of where we are. And besides, since we started on the southern bank, we’d just need to cross again to get there. Not worth it.”

“I’d be reluctant to leave the river unless we needed to,” said Vodari. “So many people call her edges home that I don’t think we’d need to, even if we are searching for settlements.”

There were more nods of agreement.

“The couple days we spent on that bear hunt in autumn did us well,” Munavan said, “I think once spring’s in full bloom we can find somewhere to stop for an extended break. If it’s still spring, there’s no way the delay will put us at risk.”

“Even last year,” Ronata said, “I don’t think the bear hunt was really what set us back; we weren’t that late. If it hadn’t been for the rainstorm we would have been with the Losadunai probably at least a moon-quarter before permanent snowfall.”

“So, I imagine we will be going south, as the Great Mother turns sharply further along. Then we will eventually come to a corridor south of another glacier. The glacier has a name, someone said. I forget it.” Kenalal groaned for a second, stalling. “Anyway, I don’t know what we will find there, but the river ends eventually.”

“The mountains are called Kartuskirpa,” Ronata said, trilling her R in a very foreign way and clearly proud of her memory and pronunciation, “Those Mamutoi travelers, from way back when, say their name for the sea at the end of the river is Moryaberán, or just Beran.”

“Oh, look at me I speak all languages known to man,” Munavan teased.

“Listen Munavan, you’re going to be grateful when your brand of diplomacy puts us at the end of a foreigner’s spear and my ability to pronounce the words ‘ _Don’t stab’_ in Mamutoi keep us alive,” Ronata shot back with humour. 

“Oh yeah? Prove it,” Darandar contributed to the teasing. Ronata replied with short, jagged syllables that did not remotely evoke the Losadunai and Zelandonii with which the travelers were familiar.

Kenalal corralled the group back on topic once again. “So I think if we make it all the way there, we will turn around, unless something truly special awaits us. But even then, that’s where I imagine we’ll call it quits.”

“How long do you realistically think it would take?” Vodari inquired.

Kenalal thought hard for a moment, but realized no amount of thinking would really draw a conclusion. Ronata interjected on his behalf. “It will be a whole year before we find ourselves here again. I promise you. Maybe longer still.”

“But there are settlements on the river,” Vodari said. “Many of them.”

“So ee can always decide to turn back when we reach any one of them,” Kenalal said.

There was a silence in the group as they pondered the vastness of the task ahead of them. When they were on the first leisurely, and at some points, even familiar, segment of their trip, their minds were focused on the joys of travelling and the destination of the Losadunai. They rarely looked further ahead – it wasn’t yet needed. Now, however, they took a solemn moment to consider the land and the people they’d left behind, and to consider how truly immense the time would be between their departure and their return. Parents would age, elders would die, children would grow, friends would mate, and they’d come back to a people unlike that which they’d left. Yet each of the eight voyagers, in turn, made their peace with the idea, for they knew no one understood the value of a home as well as one who’d lived a time lacking one.

Luzacam was often slow to get moving in the mornings, but this tendency was even more pronounced when he awoke knowing it was a non-traveling day. He made a show of repacking the contents of his traveling sacks, even if very little had been disturbed since he’d initially packed them less than a fortnight ago at Vodari and Lisonia’s hearth. He mourned the fact that he left his drum, a creation he labored over, behind with the Losaduna, but he knew the practicality of carrying it was not worth the enjoyment he’d get from irritating his companions with songs about their traits and tendencies. He could perform them acapella, anyway. He kept his carving tools rolled together in a leather bundle, woven with thick strips to keep tools like softer ivory dowels, sharp stone pins, and heftier chisels strapped in. His second, older and frayed leather roll-up was filled with delicate cigar-sized carvings of various animal shapes and geometric designs. As with Nele’s weaving, their ease of transport made them useful items of trade for the favours they could incur so far from home.

He wondered, though, how much foreign help they’d really be getting on their travels. Kenalal and Munavan seemed rather insistent that they’d avoid the S’Armunai, which was understandable if they were right about the distance, but it was perturbing that no one really seemed to know what was waiting for them the vastness between the southern twist of the Great Mother River and where it meets that so-called Beran sea. For some reason, many people were aware of the distant Mamutoi people, the people who hunted mammoth. There had even been some Mamutoi visitors to a Summer Meeting when he’d been younger, though he didn’t remember much other than the fact that they had the most unique way of creating drums. The memory stabilized the uncertainty of his thoughts: maybe these people would be waiting at the end of their journey. That gave them a goal, at least.

He finally rose from his sleeping place in the unused summer shelter of the Losadunai outpost. It was not much more than a niche in a cliff, but big enough for a hunting party or for a rest stop for eight travelers. It occurred to him then that they’d soon leave the realm of mountains, too. Where do people live, if not in the stone shelter of a cave? Tents were wretched dwellings in winter; unless the people far to the east had warm pools like Vodari’s people did.

He nearly walked right into the back of Munavan, who was clearly relieving his bladder into a nearby bush.

“Do you know what lies beyond the curve where the River turns south?” he said, turning his head to offer the barest privacy to the other man.

“Duni. Donna,” Munavan started. Spending so much time with the Losadunai had quickly blurred the ways he said some words of his own language, “Can you let a man make piss?”

“Sorry, man, I was looking the other way!”

“This sounds like the kind of question _Rand_ ,” he said, with his customary sarcasm, “Would ask Kenalal.” Munavan pulled up his leggings and made sure everything was safely tied up. When he was finished, he turned to stride closer to the other man.

“I thought you wanted to lead the pack, Munavan,” Luzacam said.

“Well that doesn’t mean I know exactly where I’m going. That’s the fun of it. Anyway, I know there are more people in the world than just the Losadunai and Mamutoi. There might be tons between the two, and we’ll find out. And if not, well, we’ll die, and everyone back home will mourn us and think we were the bravest people to ever live.”

Luzacam pushed back his hair, chuckling to mask annoyance. “I’ve got things for trade, so I would be pleased to meet some new people.”

“Well, it’s not like I can pull a boat out of my backside. I guess I’ll need to charm any newcomers with my personality and promises of labour.”

“Alright,” Luzacam said, “Maybe get Ronata to teach you that _don’t stab_ phrase.”

Munavan gave him a friendly slap. “Go pretend to be busy or else Kenalal might get in a mood. By the way? Piss hands.”

Luzacam couldn’t help but laugh a bit more genuinely this time, and he ventured off to a wooded area. He prodded around dirt with his digging stick, heeding Munavan’s advice to ‘look busy’, but did end up finding a fine little pile of subterranean onions, a food he savored.

By the end of the day, the party who had been roaming the area at a leisurely pace had returned with reasonable offerings for so soon after the spring equinox. The shriveled buds of rosebushes were collected for more vitamin-rich tea. Crocuses, whose pale violet heads were often brave enough to poke through snow-dusted soil, were collected for their oniony bulbs and the earthy, spicy taste that could be extracted from the flower proper. Coltsfoot, with dandelion-like yellow blossoms were like beacons on the muddy, desaturated early spring ground, and they were taken in for their bitter and salty flavor. Lisonia and Vodari showed their value to the group by collecting plants that had medicinal value: they stripped cherry bark for the lungs, and linden for the liver. Their companions couldn’t help but be grateful that people who finally knew something of medicine beyond wrapping a wound had joined them. Darandar had even been keen enough to find and kill a duck, which offered not only the eggs in its nest, but the downy feathers that were always welcome in making a sleeping place more bearable. Luzacam noticed Nele throw the duck-hunter a particularly warm grin when he showed her the eggs, but he didn’t quite grasp why.

As much as the party longed to indulge immediately in the greenery they’d collected, they contented themselves to sample only the most perishable and to hang the rest to dry. They filled the bulk of their appetites with more traveling cakes. They’d save the duck for the following day, before setting out the day after that.


	20. Chapter 20

The eight friends saw less and less snow as the days wore on, except in particularly nestled regions of wood and stone. They had loathed the idea of carrying winter furs again, but remembering the frigid end of the previous leg of their journey, they’d compromised with insulating but thin coats of reindeer fur, whose stiff, hollow hairs kept warmth close without adding much bulk. While this trait was useful when the coats were worn as traveling clothes, it was in fact even more indispensable when they _weren’t_ being worn – they could be folded up rather tightly and hidden away in bags instead of bulging out their travelling packs.

For seven days they walked the hilly, wooded region in the foothills of the limestone Alps. The tall peaks of the ancient mountains, much like the higher land they’d averted in autumn, were capped in solid walls of glacial ice, concealing parts of the tips from view. Each day, the party of eight would be captivated anew by the jagged, bare rock that stood like shattered bone from the increasingly green skin of its valley forests. The constant presence of the mountains on the edge of their vision gave them another guide, a contrasting second lane to the great river that served as their primary guide. The imposing mass of those mountains served as a protector to the human travelers; not only as the southern border of their route, but as a wall that held at bay the southern winds. While that southern wind could bring with it the warmth of spring, this hot air could engage in violent combat with the frigid glacial air of the north, and the people, so much smaller in scale, could be tossed like leaves in the crossfire. In the eyes of the travelers, the Alps became ancient, sleeping monsters – a presence both intimidating and awe-inspiring for its incomprehensible scale.

The longest journey Darandar had ever made in his first twenty years of life had been the move from the cave of his birth to the cave of his mate, a walk of less than ten days that seemed meagre compared to what he’d lived this year. He’d made his peace back then that mating may put a stop to his traveling days, and as such, every morning he’d be struck with a certain surrealism when he’d open his eyes to the skin ceiling of a traveling tent and the nearby snores of a mostly-male party. The feeling struck him hardest when he’d crawl out of his tent, still groggy, to undertake his morning routines. He’d pass his water and chew his customary dried mint-leaves, and if he happened to be facing south while lazily chewing his breath-sweetening cud, he’d come to appreciate the misty shapes that took form ahead of him. In the morning, the left sides of the mountains would be scalded pink by the rising sun, with contrasting shades of bluish slate-grey on the western-facing slopes. Those dark, icy slopes would not see the warmth of the sun for many hours still, shielded by their opposing counterparts. Beyond those peaks, the permanent ice that capped the highest reaches stood like impenetrable walls, like a background beyond which the Mother didn’t want to continue layering. On occasion he’d wonder if the walls were placed there for some sort of barrier, if it was like the walls in a tent keeping something in or out. On this journey he’d already seen so many things he’d scarcely thought real that he’d barely question it if giants, or animals made of pure snow, or enormous carnivorous lizards existed beyond the walls. Or maybe, like the ice sheets to the north, there was nothing past them. He remembered, though, their discussions on a hypothesized southern sea.

In these early hours of a spring morning, the air still held a chill. When Darandar sucked breath through his teeth, the mint in his mouth reacted with an icy blast. He blew his minty breath back out in a visible puff. Every morning, he’d noticed, the grass was wetter and made less of a crunch when he stepped out of his tent. And that puff of minty breath was less visible each day.

During their spring travels, they would move for longer period. The blasting heat of high summer had yet to set in, and the mountains offered protection from such fronts, anyway. As the snows of winter said their final farewells, the traveling party also had to contend with the fact that the valley between the mountains and the river was often sodden and wet, and they often walked far further than predicted just to find a comfortable, dry place to pitch their tents. For all the beauty the mountains offered them in the morning, it was little consolation to those nights they’d spent making camp on a dry, stone slab – a narrowly preferable option to having their ground-cover soak up swampy dew.

There then came a day, nine or ten days in, where the mountains unceremoniously faded from their field of vision.

“Are they gone for good?” Darandar asked, in a silent moment. “The mountains, of course.”

“Far, far to the south, they continue. But it’s more important that we follow the river. It’s more direct,” Kenalal explained with authority, though knew no more about their final destination than any of them.

“My problem would be,” Munavan continued, “That most people don’t really know what’s at the end of the mountain range, and I’d hate to walk all that way to get closed in at the end.”

“Exactly. The river leads somewhere. This much, we know.”

“I think it’s crazy we haven’t seen any people,” Darandar added. “It seemed back home you couldn’t walk a day without seeing a camp or something.”

“There are more people, for sure. We have had travelers in the past, that came from a territory as big as ours. I think the plains are just….huge. We don’t run into people. We seem to be rather densely populated back home, compared to the rest of the world,” Ronata said.

“Based on what you tell me, your caves are bigger than ours in general,” Vodari said, “And you have a lot more total caves. Though the fact that your people just use numbers to designate your caves instead of fancy names like us probably makes it easier to keep count of them.”

“It’s boring that way, isn’t it though?” Ronata countered.

“There are S’Armunai,” Lisonia contributed. “I think if we went north from here, we’d get close to where they live. Soon we will be past them. Then who knows how long it will be before we see anyone?”

Kenalal resumed, “I get the feeling in the next few days we’ll come to understand why not many people live out here.”

He did not explain why he knew, but Kenalal was quickly proven right. As they departed from the sheltered corridor of the mountains and glaciers, they faced a land far more inhospitable than the territory that blanketed the future landmass of Europe. Individual trees could be seen from a great distance, so sparse were the tall ones. In comforting eddies of warmer wind and softer soil grew a few brave and hardy trees – spruce or pine, with tough, waxy needles – but they were a minority to the smaller shrubbery that dominated. Few trees outgrew the human travelers. The area was blanketed instead by bushy and dwarven plants. The travelers would have their legs scraped by the skinny sharp-edged sedges and the dry, twiggy grasses that could thrive in the dry and chilly steppe environment. Early in the season, the grasses were yet to ripen to full greenery, and were a patchwork of greens, reds, and yellows, intermixed with the occasional distant watering hole, often bordered by sturdy little trees. The snowy winter wonderlands of modern-day cold climates were paradoxically uncommon in glacial times; while it was often cold enough for snow, the ice that rained down from the sky would putter about in swooping whirls and rarely leave blankets on the steppes. Far too much of the earth’s water was trapped in those massive ice sheets. What remained kept shelter in rivers and lakes, and only occasionally yielded a healthy serving of snow or rain.

After just a couple of days in this environment, Darandar was already bored of his surroundings. He somehow worried the surrealism of those mountains had prevented him from appreciating how beautiful they really were, and he missed the rocky behemoths. He now spent every day staring at grass. Tall grass, sharp grass that tickled his limbs, short grass that crunched, sweet-smelling grass, grass that ended with wheaty little puffs – which also tickled, if you walked right into it. It was hard _not_ to run into it, when the walking had become so easy, yet so dull. No longer did they need to stare at their feet to navigate rocky outcroppings and avoid sudden soggy patches. The earth here was dry, flat, and alarmingly _consistent._

There was one advantage to the flat, persistent lands of the taiga, however. They could see for miles. Every so often, Darandar would hear Ronata’s voice say _check it out, look at that, sh! Don’t scare the cat!_ Kenalal did his fair share of pointing things out, too, along with Vodari, though Vodari’s explanations were often far more esoteric. He wondered sometimes why they seemed to know so much about the exact same world Darandar had always lived in. Vodari made sense, at least, because he was an acolyte. He was taught to see the things normal people didn’t see. Kenalal and Ronata had never been far from their home territory to his knowledge, but they seemed to be able to notice things that he didn’t always consciously register, like how Kenalal could know a rock was good for knapping just by nudging it with his foot, or how Ronata would place something gross and weird up to his mouth, and encourage him to taste it. It was usually not so bad, and it was never deadly as of yet. He felt some peaceful feeling in his heart then, as though he was a child learning about the world.

One hazy morning, it was Darandar’s turn to shout out, “Look over there!” Far to the north, beyond the shimmering waves of blowing grass, the imposing masses of a heard of mammoths paraded. Much like with their modern, hairless relatives, the larger herds of mammoths tended to be made up primarily of females, with most of the males being boys or young juveniles at most. Mammoths were among the rare creatures who lived as long as human beings, often making it to seventy years if their teeth didn’t betray them first. It was often one of these elders, experienced and sedate, that led the heard – a matriarch in the most grandmotherly sense. Again like humans, these elders often found grey in their long hair.

Darandar remained transfixed by the creatures. He knew they existed and had seen evidence of such in the ivory and bone that were so valuable in tools. Munavan, particularly, made use of such things in construction, as no animal offered tooth and bone as large as those of the mammoth. Darandar had never seen them living, though, and the mass of the ten-foot-long ivory tusks had only given a hint at how huge they seemed with their fat and fur intact. To even make them out at such a distance was proof. He could tell they came in varying shades of red and brown, with tall shoulders and a somewhat lowered back end. Their heads were domed with a beehive-like coif of soft, sturdy hair, and their shoulders likewise had a hump. They felt around the ground with their trunks, and prehensile fifth limb that allowed them to graze without lowering their massive heads to the ground. He had to chuckle, then. It occurred to him how absurd it was that Doni decided to make these creatures use their nose like a hand. He tried to wrap his mind around how it would feel, to use a nose like a hand, which only rolled his chuckle into a laugh. It seemed his companions had a similar thought – many breathed a laugh both amused and awestruck.

Nele had once again fallen asleep pondering the things she’d heard from Vodari during the day. It seemed like a routine now; he would tell her things that perhaps only Those Who Serve should know. His Losaduna was far away, now. Vodari was an acolyte in title, but he was the only practitioner of mysticism in their group and therefore had a certain authority; a knowledge the others didn’t. For an acolyte, Nele considered, it was probably strange to be away from your network of likeminded people, no longer having peers or mentors to whom you could express your thoughts. Nele didn’t mind filling that niche for Vodari. Somehow, it suited her. It seemed Kenalal and Ronata, and the others too, would always offer practical reasons for the events and phenomena they saw on their travels. Vodari, though, took it a step further - brought a deeper view. Nele appreciated listening to all versions.

Now she was awake again, while the sky was still dark. She was thinking about mammoths. Darandar had asked, after their encounter, why mammoths had such strange noses. Kenalal offered a smart and obvious answer about how they were not nimble enough to bend over to eat like many other grass-eaters, so they learned. Vodari offered some strange tale about the Mother’s choices in designing every animal, saying that She first made big mammoths with small trunks, and small mammoths with big trunks, and the two mixed spirits until the behemoths they knew today were born. Luzacam had his own input – he’d said “they have long noses because they have such long teeth.” And when asked about the long teeth, he’d simply said, “because they have long noses.” She laughed, then, and decided that was the best answer of them all. Nele smiled to herself in the darkness of the tent. _I’m grateful to want to waste my time thinking of these things,_ she thought. She’d spent so many years wrapped up in herself that she’d never spent the time to really ponder what others thought, except what they thought about her – mostly negative, she’d assumed. But Luzacam and Darandar were so funny, and Kenalal was wise, and Vodari and Munavan were fun to talk to, and Lisonia gave her a welcome dose of ‘girl talk’. It gave her something to work around in her brain, slowly flushing away anxieties and replacing them with a richer stew of contemplation. She was still thinking about mammoths. Walking for days and days on their dry steppe home, just like her; scrounging up food from the surreptitiously rich grasslands. She was so close to drifting off again, counting mammoths in a dreamy herd, when she noticed a distant squeal.

Her eyes opened wide, losing the tattered edges of sleep. It sounded like a human scream, maybe a woman, but hard to tell. Distant and yelping, with a slight hissing aura about it. Nele stilled her breath. She waited for another, wondering if it was simply a terror creeping into the corner of a dream. She heard another, clearly real scream. It had a sense of horror about it, yet it sounded clipped short instead of drawn-out like a human call to help. She lifted herself to a seated position and wriggled free of her furs. She unlatched the tent flap, threw on her soft camp shoes, and followed the vague direction of the sound.

In the grasslands, the sunrise didn’t strike as suddenly. The barest sliver of sunlight coming over the horizon and bruising the black sky with violet was already apparent despite the myriad stars that still decorated the firmament. Nele stumbled north, carefully placing one foot in front of the other amidst brambles and the occasional booby-trap of a hamster burrow.

In the very moment she noticed she hadn’t heard anything but distant bird song in a while, she heard another vivid, piercing scream. It was coming from right beside her.


	21. Chapter 21

Nele jerked her head in the direction of the noise. Her heart leapt to her throat. The briefest flicker of a thought warned her if it was indeed an injured human, she had little means to help. A more powerful thought clouded into her mind, though, perhaps because of her close association with Vodari. _Spirits._ The potential shot ice through her veins, leaving her fingers tingly. There were stories of spirits, nasty spirits, who could imitate a human voice to lure people away from the halo of their campfire. Some even said the voice the spirits stole came from the dying shouts of previous offerings. Some said, even more grimly, that the only words the spirits could utter aloud were the last words of those who’d died in their presence. Nele felt an invisible parade of ants scurry up her neck, and in a hollow moment before the urge to flee, she caught sight of movement.

It was a medium-sized furry mass, pacing back and forth. Now so nearby, she heard occasional rattling chatter, far quieter than the shrieks from before. The creature paused and sat back on its haunches. It took a moment for her to recognize the form of a fox. The most widespread type of fox around the world was the iconic red coloration, a rusty hue that evoked some of the tufted, russet grasses of the plains and that slipped unseen into autumn foliage. This fox was neither the common red, nor the rarer but possible dark-grey colouration that was seen more frequently prowling nearer to the northern ice sheets. Nele slowly lowered herself to a crouch to observe. The young vixen had the same dark paws and forelegs as her red cousins, and her ears were tufted with dark fur, almost akin to those lynx that had so enamored Nele. Her tail was puffy, in a dull grey colour that extended into a gradient stripe on her lower back, and tipped with stark white. The rest of the vixen was startlingly white – if not as white as snow, at least as white as a spring raincloud. Her nose was a black button on a muzzle set between two piercing yellow-grey eyes, standing out sharply with their dark liner. In the dimness of pre-dawn, the animal’s eyes displayed disarmingly wide pupils, and Nele felt a tug of sympathy, as though she was looking at a child.

The fox didn’t back away when Nele made a few gentle clicks with her tongue. The fox produced a sharp wail, of just the right pitch to evoke a human being, and began pacing again.

“What’s your problem, huh?” Nele said gently. It occurred to her briefly that this fox had a beautiful pelt that could be of great value, but she had no weapons and no heart to harm this animal that seemed so uniquely sympathetic with its round, humane eyes. Nele very gradually scooted forward, with a crouching crawl that would be intensely impractical for those unaccustomed to the postures of a hunter-gatherer. She set a long leg before her and smoothly, quietly followed with the rest of her body. She was now only her body’s length away from the animal, and still, it made no effort to run. It made a begging, whining sound, like that which its distant domestic relatives would one day use to command food. She investigated the animal’s demeanor more thoroughly, perplexed and intrigued by its lack of fear and its unique noises. Nele then noticed a trench before the creature, and at last, heard a second set of matching, high-pitched whines.

“What’s in here?” she asked the fox again. The vixen responded with backing up slightly. Nele shifted forward at a similar rate, maintaining a consistent distance between them. She peered into a narrow, deep trench carved into a hard, rocky segment of ground. In the growing blue light of morning, she could see another mound of fur wriggling in the dark, narrow space. The ball of fur wove a symphony of dissonant yelps and squeals. Nele gasped, and the ball of fur separated itself into segments. “Babies!” she exclaimed, still trying to keep her voice low. None of these little furballs shared the white colour of the adult before her, but they were diverse. One was red, darker and less saturated than the vibrant orange most associated with foxes, but still distinctly red – and the other two were varying shades of grey. “Sorry to get in your way!” Nele said to the fox, good-naturedly.

Something was off about the fox, though. It seemed disconcerted. Nele looked to the parent, then to the children, back to the parent, and back again to the trench in which the kits found themselves. “You can’t reach them,” Nele finally concluded. She sat back on her heels and watched the fox yet again. “I know you are a fox, but you are a Mama too. And your mate will be sad if you lose your babies. I hear fox-men take care of the women and children of their hearths.” Nele looked again into the deep black pupils, surrounded by a flax-coloured iris. Though the thought seemed odd, she indulged in the impulse. First, she held her hands up, revealing the palms to the animal as if she was giving her a formal greeting, though she was only trying to display her lack of threat. She had the urge to say, _in the name of the Great Earth Mother._ She gingerly put a long, delicate hand into the crevice, and lowered it to the balls of fur. With the most prudent, delicate touch, she wrapped her hand around the first kit she brushed against. She felt the nip of tiny teeth at her knuckles, but the babies were so young and tiny that it hurt less than grazing a rosebush. She pawed blindly in the trench until she knew she had a grip and retrieved the darker of the two grey kits. She placed the young fox delicately at the feet of its mother, who stared at it for a moment, unsure. Nele repeated the process with the red fox, and this time, the vixen scurried forward and began to lick at the babies with her tongue. Nele retrieved the final fox, a lighter grey one with a silver-blue stripe down its back, and placed it with its siblings. She pulled her hands back into her lap, hoping to demonstrate a nonthreatening demeanor to the animal. The white vixen stared at her with her cunning pale-blond eyes. Her white fur was lit with blues and purples from the rising sun, which was now cresting the horizon in earnest. The white fox picked up her babies with a gentle clench of the jaw, turned her luxurious white and grey tail to the woman, and left.

Nele smiled, meditative. Animals were such a wonderful gift for the food and tools they provided to humans, but sometimes they seemed like such a blessing just to witness. Had the woman perhaps decided to keep one of the kits to herself instead of relinquishing it to its mother, mankind could have grown to have an entirely different best friend.

“Weird for Nele to be up first,” Ronata said, crawling out of her tent to see Vodari prodding the previous night’s fire back to life. “Wonder if she’ll find us some snacks.”

She smiled at Vodari when saying this, and he caught onto the humour. Nele wasn’t one to go on a solo morning hunt. Her snack-collecting was usually restrained to chowing down on sweet pod legumes or tart strawberries that she’d collect and devour in the field. Though, Ronata remembered, she did know a few things about edible mushrooms.

“I don’t know where she is,” Vodari said. “We were chatting a little longer when most of you went to sleep, but not any later than usual.”

Ronata stretched languidly and tied the strings on her thin reindeer shirt. It would probably get warm enough to do without it at high noon, but she hated being cold. She meandered up a slight slope on the edge of their campsite, and gazed down to see the shape of her strange sweetheart crouched near the ground, observing a fox.

“Hey, Vodari, look,” she said, nonchalantly.

Vodari scuttled behind her. “Wow.”

The curiosity Nele had about mammoths had been flipped abruptly into a curiosity about foxes, and she decided on impulse to track the creatures further. She knew it was unwise to venture too far from the camp alone, without a weapon. It occurred to her that she probably should have taken a spear even when she’d heard the yelp, or at least a sling, the weapon with which she was more comfortable. She knew she wasn’t far, though, and elected to walk a bit further. They had been taking a generally western route, after all, and they wouldn’t necessarily pass the sights in any other directions.

Foxes were smart little semi-carnivores – they ate rabbits and birds, and sometimes eggs, but like wild dogs and unlike wild cats, they’d indulge in fruits and vegetables when those were readily available. Also in contrast to wolves and many other wild dogs, they didn’t generally live in packs with complex social relationships, often living m.ostly with their immediate family. They had a wide variety of vocalizations, including a hyena-like knobby cackle and a hissing whine. The scream of the vixen that Nele had heard earlier was a less common noise – more often made by females, and most often used as a communication just between mates. Foxes were just as common in Nele’s home territory, and she even had a bright red fox fur muff that she held in very high regard, but that scream was something quite unfamiliar to her, and even knowing its origin, she still found herself rather spooked by the memory.

Nele reached a section of the dry steppe that was clustered with short needled trees. Perhaps this was a place like where her white vixen lived – foxes had low-lying dens, and the hollow left from a fallen tree made a perfect little cavern for them. When she broke through the small cluster, Nele was surprised to see the embankment towards the river was far steeper here. More surprisingly still, this was where the river curved sharply south after a generally westward flow. The pink lighting of morning shimmered on the steady flow of the Great Mother River, and Nele sighed contentedly when she watched it. Somewhere in the distance she heard more yelping that probably came from foxes, perhaps the same ones as before. But Nele was more taken when she noticed downriver an unusually wooded valley nestled in the steepest bank.

“So you’re really good for something, after all,” Munavan said, putting a meaty hand on Nele’s shoulder.

“It was nothing,” she replied.

“You’re right, actually, it was nothing, we could have easily gotten to this nice little place without your help,” Munavan teased in response.

After a week of repetitive steppe conditions, the group was rather excited to find such an unusually rich swath of land alongside the river. They had put in a solid eight hours of walking that first day to set up camp in the best possible locale. They had needed to work their way down a particularly steep section of slope that they would not have bothered with were they not intending to stay; though the greenery and water access made staying directly alongside the river appealing, the party had taken to walking further afield to avoid the mire that could be stomped through, along with the rushes and cattails that inhibited the trail. They set up camp in a fine, grassy area slightly uphill from the river’s edge, sheltered by the slopes to the side and sections of uncharacteristically tall pine trees and a few odd, craggy oaks. The dry oak logs were a welcome addition to the fire, which on the plains, was generally a constantly-ravenous sputter of flame fed with dried needle and moss tinder but could be comfortably slow-burning with the help of a hardwood log.

They discussed their options over the fire, and elected to stay for six days. The next day they’d go up to the plains to hunt, and then spend the remaining time processing whatever meat they collected and refueling for their next trek.

A herd of horses, mostly females with a few dominating male patriarchs, grazed the plains in a calm, huffing crowd. Hunting herd animals required all hands on deck – it was one of those hunts that even those older women who prioritized childrearing, or skilled tradesmen, or learned magicians who spent less time on food collecting, would take part in. The human party had put a particular effort in choosing the order of the chasers: Kenalal and Nele, fast but not strong, would begin the chase. Munavan, who was moderately fast and very strong, was followed by Luzacam, who was just as fast if less strong. Lisonia and Vodari, who were neither fast nor strong, came into the pursuit when the prey began to tire just enough that a dip in speed would not inhibit their capture, and the chase was ended with Darandar, who was very mobile with a compact musculature, and Ronata, who was a terrible runner but had a way with composed, clean final shots. If the chase was not immediately successful – which it probably wouldn’t be – the cycle would begin again, but Kenalal’s running endurance would take a progressively larger role while Luzacam, Darandar, Munavan, and Ronata focused on readying their spears.

The herd of horses swirled about in a trotting eddy, soon churned into a gallop by the alternating pursuit for eight hunters. Kenalal seemed to gallop with the effortless endurance of a horse, whereas Nele ran with a light step but a heaving chest. Munavan and Luzacam surprised the dull beige mare by cutting off her path and diverting her in the opposite direction. The following pursuants led her further from her herd, and the cycle repeated again until the animal was cornered near a slope and penetrated in three parts of her torso with three separate spears.

Three of the men returned to the camp to collect a makeshift stretcher to carry what they wanted to process back to their campsite, while the rest worked to ready the horse. Vodari offered a gentle prayer to the horse’s spirit, thanking both her and the Mother for its sacrifice, as they let the blood from her neck and removed the unwanted organs. Ronata made an odd game of tossing offal across the plains, which would quickly draw the attention of any mammalian or avian scavengers and keep them distracted from the prime cuts. Darandar made a face of disgust when the former lobbed a hunk of kidney an impressive distance, but he caved and threw the other kidney further still.

They saved the sirloin meat from the lower back, along with the flanks and a big section of ribs, to cook during their brief stay – the sirloin because it was delicious, and the ribs because they didn’t preserve well. Shoulders and medallions would be sliced thin for drying – the least fat possible had to be included in the jerky-like dried meat, as the fat would turn waxy and foul – and the fattiest sections would be cooked down for grease that would be preserved in gobs, more than for the meat itself. They also decided that - since their prey was, after all, a horse - that they’d hang onto the hooves for the collagen contained within, which could be rendered into a sticky, viscous bonding agent.

That evening, they consumed rich, fresh meat, fried with some wild mushrooms Nele uncovered in a surreptitious damp area of their wooded hideout. Many posed the question, during their meal, why no humans seemed to live anywhere near this pleasant hideout.

After the evening meal, Luzacam went to the river’s edge to clean off his hands and his eating tools, as well as to collect a bit more water to finish processing the kill. They’d already started slinging thin strips of meat over racks to dry, but their work wasn’t entirely done. He crouched at the edge of a narrower section of the water, rinsing off his knife. When he lifted his head, he looked straight across the body of water – right into two eyes set in an unknown face.


	22. Chapter 22

Luzacam and the strange man stared each other down. The Zelandonii party had managed to skirt any foreign peoples for the past month of their journey, and even when they’d been with the Losadunai, the shared heritage and relative closeness of the tribes was discernable in their culture, language, and style of dress. This fact accented how deeply man across the tributary differed from those Luzacam was used to – his people commonly wore shades of yellow and beige animal skins, with tooth-and-bone decorative necks, and belts around the waist or hips that served both a fashion and utility purpose. This foreign man wore a skirt made of woven grasses, some white, some green, and a few in dark, bold, reds and black, forming stripes and patterns across their weaving. His shirt was of a finer texture that didn’t look like skin, and he had very few accessories of shell or teeth, only bone. His hair was somewhat wavy, of an ashy brown colour, and he had a lightly bearded face. After their moment of wide-eyed and expressionless stares, the man began to take on a defensive expression, seeming displeased at the stranger. _Are we on their lands?_ Luzacam asked himself. _What’s his problem?_

The man began to speak, shaking around a spear, and though he needed to holler to be heard across the water, Luzacam was rattled by how unfamiliar all the sounds were. His language was surely not a close-cousin of Zelandonii like Losadunai was. It was something else entirely. Luzacam made a weak attempt to put forward some kind of message. He put his hand on his chest and said his name. “Luzacam,” he articulated slowly, “Luzacam of the the Zelandonii.”

The man shouted over his shoulder, and a few more men came forward. Luzacam shrank back as they started to storm across the tributary.

“Bold words from the World’s Most Boring Man,” Ronata teased Kenalal as they headed to the water with Darandar.

“Why are you always coming for me?” Kenalal replied with a soft tone of annoyance. “Luzacam’s the one who’s been at the river for ages, did he fall in love with his reflection or something?”

“Probably,” Darandar sniggered, “Do you see how long it takes him to comb his beard?”

“Are you not envious, though, that he can grow a beard at all?” Ronata chided.

Darandar made a contrite face, but Ronata responded with a gentle stroke of her fingertips onto his sparsely stubbled jawline. “Well personally, I prefer a man without a beard.”

“That would be a bigger compliment from someone who doesn’t _also_ like _women_ without beards.”

The two giggled a particular giggle that made Kenalal’s mouth tighten into an uncomfortable, straight line.

“Wait,” he said abruptly. The trio stopped in their step at the edge of the beach. “Oh, no.”

Across the water they could see three men, along with enough gear to indicate the three probably weren’t alone. The men dressed in woven-grass clothing that seemed absurdly alien. They had Luzacam before them, his hands clasped, and their spears pointed in his general direction.

“This is not what I was hoping for when I said I wanted to see more people,” Darandar said, just as he felt a speartip lightly jab him above the kidneys.

Luzacam was both relieved to see his friends - so he wouldn’t suffer the indignity of capture alone - and unhappy that his captors had rounded up all eight of them. He was hopeful, at first, seeing only Ronata, Kenalal, and Darandar, that Munavan could lead the four remaining friends in a rescue mission. It wasn’t long, though, before the hefty man was led out with the magician and the two women. Another pair of grass-skirt-wearing hunters carried behind them a rack of the horsemeat that had been left to dry.

“Oh, come on,” Luzacam muttered under his breath. His words were unnoticed to the men. He had his hands lightly bound by thongs – loose enough to be neither painful nor particularly restraining, but significant enough to show they meant business. He could possibly wriggle free, but he figured he could be met with spears for the infraction. As they approached, he noticed his friends were unbound, but did not struggle, under the same threat of force.

“Hey, what’s up?” Munavan said, with remarkable nonchalance, when he was led to the same area Luzacam was kept. Luzacam replied with a similar sarcasm: “Oh, just enjoying some relaxing time with these gentlemen right here. Look at the new bracelets they gave me!” he hoisted his tied hands. He briefly glanced at the captors, hoping they were not alarmed by his words. He’d hate the be stabbed for a joke, of all things.

The unknown people rallied the travelers onto a raft, six people total at a time, and ferried them to the other side of the water. They were then led up the steep opposite slope of the river, to a camp made of conical tents covered in horse-hide. Luzacam doubted this was a permanent dwelling – probably only a summer camp. The tents, made of what little wood could be scrounged on the plains and reinforced with dry grass and needled branches, were covered in what appeared to be decorated horse-hide. Until this point, he’d never encountered peoples who lived long-term away from the shelter of a cave, and he highly doubted this flat and inhospitable area was the best place to be dwelling out in the open.

The party of eight was led to a large fire, and the man that was possibly the leader of the hunters indicated for them to sit down. He began to speak to many other people, but none of the travelers could comprehend the words. Luzacam tried to pay particular attention to his gestures, but even those could vary across cultures, and told very little without words to express nuance. It did appear indeed that this man was the leader of the hunters, if not the whole camp, because people kept coming to him for questions. But the way he spoke reverently to this woman seated on a narrow bench before the fire made him think perhaps she had a position of power. She had a litany of decorative items on her clothes, enough that would probably jingle distractingly in a hunt. She wore a choker of woven horse-hair with a caved bone Donii figure dangling from it. He assumed, then, that she could be their Zelandoni or their Losaduna, or whatever they were.

Luzacam also noticed that the physical differences between his group and the residents of the area extended beyond clothes. Back home, Luzacam’s yellow-speckled brown eyes were quite uncommon, and Kenalal’s black eyes and dark hair were more uncommon still. The grey-blue possessed by Darandar and Munavan was far closer to the norm. These people had hair that came in the same dun and dust-brown shades as the horses that herded nearby, and many had eyes of yellowy and hazel casts. It was strange to feel so foreign, despite the fact that his own dark blond hair and brown eyes actually brought him closer in appearance to this group than he resembled most of his friends.

There was an awkward silence between the group, until Kenalal whispered.

“That’s probably their magic woman. She doesn’t look too threatening towards us. I’m thinking we can get out of here peacefully.”

“We better, because they took my knife.” Luzacam replied.

“Same,” Darandar added.

Munavan, always brave and brash, spoke louder. “Greetings from Munavan of the Zelandonii. Why did you bring us here?”

While the woman and the man who were discussing didn’t seem to understand the words, they knew they were being addressed. They exchanged a glance, and the man stepped forward first.

“Kolin,” he said, holding a hand to his chest. The middle-aged woman, stepped forward. She was not very tall, and while was thin, she had the rounded edges of someone who did not do much physical labour. She was probably nearing her forties in age, and her hair was a similar mousy brown to the man. “Tansu Haduma. _Haduma,”_ He repeated as he indicated the woman. “Hadumai.” He said, gesturing around the others of the camp. The meaning was quite easy to discern from that. It now obvious that the woman was their magician, as her title was so similar to the name of the tribe, which seemed to be a trend amongst all peoples of the area.

“Greetings, Kolin. Haduma,” Munavan said with a nod towards each. He placed a hand on his chest. “Munavan. Zelandonii.” He gestured at Luzacam, who continued by saying his own name, all through the line.

“Vodari of the Losadunai,” said the last man in the lineup. “I am acolyte. I will be a Haduma, in my own group.” The string of words he uttered was long, and the people knotted their foreheads in confusion. Vodari put his hand on the largest amulet he wore around his neck. “Vodari acolyte to tribe’s Haduma.”

Kolin looked at Haduma and murmured something. Haduma shook her head. “Haduma viviar. Haduma kula viviak.”

The party gave up on understanding that.

The man took over. He gestured at the group.

“He’s accusing us of something,” Kenalal said.

“Tansu hadu,” he said. He gestured at the people before him, made a gesture like a gallop, and repeated, “Tansu hadu, ta ola.” He wiggled his arm to indicate movement, and made a fist, which he slapped into the palm of his other hand. He gestured to a man standing near the rack that had been taken from the campsite. He lifted a piece of the meat and wiggled it around before the travelers.

“Oh, oh, I think I get it,” Ronata said.

“They’re mad because we ate their horses,” Kenalal explained.

“Look at these guys, everything here is horse. They have tail-hair woven into belts, they have skins on the tents, and they’ve got pictures and carvings of them all over. These people are horse enthusiasts if I’ve ever seen them,” Luzacam elaborated.

“Well, that’s dumb,” Darandar said, “Do you own an animal if it’s still alive? I thought you couldn’t claim an animal as yours unless you were the one to kill it.”

“Maybe they lay claim to much of the land here. You know back home we won’t hunt on the territory of another cave without their permission,” Ronata rationalized.

“But can’t they tell we’re travelers?” Lisonia interjected, “I mean look at us, we stick out like white mammoths here, and we speak a language not remotely the same.”

“There’s been some kind of misunderstanding,” Munavan said, “We are travelers. We are only doing what we must to get across. Return us our meat, please.”

Kolin didn’t like this. He hoisted his spear again.

“Doni bless,” Luzacam said, “You’re really working your charm, Shude.”

“Let me try,” Lisonia said. She addressed the woman. She spoke extremely slowly and used broad, obvious gestures. “We come. Far, far, far, far. We go, far, far, far. We take _hadu,_ only one.” Lisonia lifted a single finger. “We eat. We go far, far, far.” The second time she said ‘far’, Lisonia moved her hands in the direction opposite to the first.

The two Hadumai looked at each other and began to murmur. They walked over to a few more of the hunters and chattered for a bit. When they returned, the Haduma tried to explain with similar grandiose gestures. “Tansu hadu,” she gestured to the rack, “Tan velks. Hadu,” she gestured to the east, where the sun rose, “Ta ola.”

“Are you saying we can take it, then?” Munavan asked.

The woman shook her head and gestured at the rack. “Velks hadu.”

“So they are keeping it, but we are allowed to take….a different horse?” Kenalal tried to understand.

The woman gestured at some tents and laid her head on her arms, continuing to talk. “We can sleep here,” Luzacam said. “I think they want to keep the horse.”

“Well, that isn’t great,” Munavan said, “But it’s better than getting stabbed.”

The grass-skirted hunters undid the thongs on Luzacam’s arms, and he wondered why he’d been the only one bound. If he saw a big man like Munavan coming at him with as much ardor, he’d probably want to keep him restrained, at least. The group was led towards a collection of tents.

When they arrived at a pair of large, hide-covered and cone-shaped tents, the eight friends were quick to herd themselves together into one of them. Their guard stopped them. He shook his head in a “no” gesture. “Viviara et,” he gestured to one tent, “Vivaksa et,” he gestured to the other. He was met with blank stares.

“Viviar.” Haduma said. She put a hand on her chest, and lifted a hand to point at Lisonia. “Vivaks,” she said next, pointing a finger at Kolin, at Darandar, and at Luzacam.

“They’re saying to keep men and women separate,” Kenalal said.

“Oh, I don’t like that,” said Ronata.

“Well let’s not make stands on sex-divided roles in another tribe, okay?” Luzacam sneered. He followed four of his companions into the tent, and Lisonia, Nele, and Ronata went into the other.

Inside the tent, the three women began to settle in. Ronata felt somewhat awkward sharing a bed with both her lover and a woman she had no romantic feelings about, though she had on many occasions slept between Darandar and Nele. A female guard sat inside the tent at the entrance, observing them.

“What do they even want?” Lisonia asked, “I thought they wanted our horse. They can have it, if it means we can leave.”

“I don’t know. But I get the feeling this place is strange with regards to sex. Did you notice how there were very few women at the camp?” Ronata asked.

“Well, it could be a hunting camp, those tend to have fewer women anyway.” Lisonia rationalized.

“I saw women,” Nele said, “But they kept to themselves. It’s awkward. I feel like I’m doing something wrong traveling in a male party.”

Ronata noticed that the female guard made piercing eyes at Nele. Nele had been very silent and uncomfortable during the ordeal, and this was one of the first times she spoke.

“Ta.” The guard announced. She clasped Nele’s arm and made her to stand. She looked her over, head to toe, craning her neck to see the details of the tall woman’s face. She pulled her outside and called over Haduma.

Nele froze, lump tightening in her throat. The Haduma chattered with the woman, and began to pat Nele down, examining her all the while. Nele felt a surge of butterflies in her stomach, churning and tingling down to her groin. It was not the tingles of arousal, though; it was fueled by anxiety. She was wearing only a short, thin sleeping tunic and she felt unbelievably exposed. Ronata poked her head out of the tent and began speaking sternly to the “hosts”, but her words were not understood or even acknowledged.

Haduma swept her hands down Nele’s abdomen and thighs, and began to lift her skirt. Reflexively, Nele brought her hands down hard on the hem of her tunic. Haduma was unimpressed.

“Ne,” she said, voice stern with undercurrents of anger. “Esne viviar,” she began, and continued with words uttered too quickly to be understood, but with a tone that seemed outraged. The female guard stepped away, and the man who’d been observing the men’s tent came forward and took Nele away, pushing her rather unkindly towards the men’s tent.

Lisonia caught a look of deep pain, accented with shame, on Nele’s face as she was led away. She turned to Ronata and saw the exact same distressed look.

Darandar felt Nele’s cold hand press against his chest in the blackness of the tent. He had been tired enough from today’s hunt that he fell asleep the moment he got under the furs, despite the relatively cramped tent he’d been forced into.

“Why are you here?” he murmured very gently, only faintly audible to anyone else in the tent.

“I’m not allowed to be with the women,” she said, almost silently. Darandar caught a certain gurgle in her throat, and realized in the darkness that she was being choked by tears.

“They figured it out, huh?” He regretted his choice of words immediately, feeling as if he was accusing her default state of being somehow deceptive to the Hadumai.

“They tried to look at…my body, my whole body, I feel horrible. I feel wrong.” She buried her face in his smooth, bare chest, and he felt wetness from her eyes. He could hear she was stifling a sob. The words came out choked, “Not _viviar.”_

“Nele,” he started, with a gentle, almost paternal tone, “These people have weird ideas about sex. Vodari was going on before we fell asleep. I think these people think only women can be Doniers. Can you believe? Vodari, and Losaduna, and all them, they’d be banned from doing what they do here. And it looks like only men hunt, too. Where would we be if Ronata couldn’t help hunt?”

“I deceived them. I let them think I was a girl,” Nele said, self-deprecating.

“You are a girl, to us. If anything, let yourself feel lucky that the tribe we call home has embraced you for how you are. Didn’t Vodari say the Mother made you different on purpose?”

Nele scraped her reddened eyes on his collarbone. Darandar cringed from the dampness on his skin, but he didn’t let it show. He didn’t want to push her away when she wanted consoling.

“Yes.”

“Then these people are stupid if they don’t let men show their skills in magic, or let women show their skills with hunting, or let people like you live their lives. They’re the ones who’ll miss out. Plus, they live in a stupid grass world. I bet they don’t know what maple sugar tastes like. Imagine how they’d feel if they saw an _entire tree._ ”

Nele’s laughter was choked together in a bundle of sobs, but the laughter seemed to dominate slightly.

“Thank you,” Nele said, pressing herself even harder against him. Darandar felt a comfortable stir of protectiveness towards her. Though he’d been in this very same position with Nele’s promised more than once, Ronata never let herself get so vulnerable. Despite the accusations of the Hadumai, in moments like this, Darandar almost thought Nele was _more_ of a girl than Ronata, regardless of her birth.

“Thank you,” he heard her repeat again, as he drifted closer to sleep. He felt damp lips on his mouth.


	23. Chapter 23

“We won’t stop you from taking part in a hunt,” Ronata started the next morning, “But Nele and I are leaving. We don’t understand what these people expect from us, but we are pretty sure we defy their customs in many ways. The women give me the dirty eyeball every time I walk by.”

“I am coming too,” Vodari said. “I came to the conclusion last night that these people probably don’t take on male acolytes to their magicians. I think they may think that since women are the ‘Blessed of Duna’, they are the only ones to form true connections to Her Spirit. My Losaduna explained to me that some people feel women have an _advantage_ , but I didn’t know of any tribes who believed it so universally. I think Lisonia should come too,” he turned to his mate, “If you’re alright with that. I think it would be easier if we sent only men on the hunt; if they didn’t want to take you, you’d be left unable to communicate with the women at the camp.”

“We’ll go back to where the tent is pitched. I hope they didn’t wreck everything, and that no creatures came by to tear our campsite apart. It seems the hunters took a lot of our stuff with them. We will need to ask for our weapons back. Who knows how we’ll deal with that?” Ronata sighed. Those who were leaving were among the less diplomatic, and she was generally uncomfortable asking outright.

“I will ask,” Lisonia said. “Even though they have odd customs for women, I feel like they revere them. If women don’t hunt, it’s because they are being protected, not because they are being oppressed.”

Vodari and the group’s three females returned to find the campsite in good order. A tentpole was collapsed, and one of the racks of horsemeat that had been left behind was dragged apart by animals, but the teeth marks seemed to indicate the fault of something small and weasel-like, not a huge predator like a bear. They took stock of what remained of their provisions.

“I don’t know, want to fish the river?” Ronata finally asked.

“I still don’t know what the men are doing back there. Munavan seems to think they’ll let them take meat when they leave, but Luzacam isn’t so hopeful,” Lisonia mused.

“Well, all the more reason to have something ready when they get back.”

When they approached the water from a slight overhang, they were quick to realize one of the greatest populations in this segment of the river were sturgeon – _enormous_ sturgeon. The ripples they left when they came to the surface gave an initial impression that the humans were watching a whole school of fish pass by, only to realize it was the long, grey body of a single continuous sturgeon. The ancient river-dwellers with their flat, catfish faces were unexpectedly large – they were as long as two adult humans laid toe-to-head, and they could weigh as much as a horse. The group realized that if they couldn’t drag a horse carcass out of the water, they may as well not risk such a venture with a sturgeon unless a more modestly-sized one came along.

“On second thought,” Ronata said, seeing another grey mass pass through the water like an entire caravan of lesser fish, “Maybe let’s take a break on this rock and then go look around for birds or mushrooms.”

She nestled herself behind Nele and undid the latter’s messy braid. She began to work her fingers through her dark curls to untangle them. This was both a gesture of affection, withheld in the presence of foreign tribes, and a bit of a distraction from the low hum of worry they felt for their companions they left behind.

“Nothing will happen to the men, right?” Nele asked, voice creaky.

“They let us go without a fight, Sweets, and they didn’t keep anyone restrained once they took the ties off Luzacam. I think living out here on the plains, they’re a lot more isolated, and a lot more wary of new people. Think about all the grass and trees back home, and think about the resources here. Maybe they just can’t afford to be that charitable,” Ronata explained, gently working Nele’s hair from its tips to its roots to work out any knots. It was true that hunter-gatherer societies relied on the mutual support and efforts of a community, but especially in periods and places with harsh conditions, a stark contrast between in-groups and out-groups could occur. The Hadumai didn’t appear to have the same high-walled limestone caves as many of the more western peoples did, which may have led to greater difficulties in territorial claims. Fortunately for the travelers, the span of their trail contained societies with a few inherent similar customs – enough, at least, that very few people would kill a foreigner on the spot.

“So, where were you last night?” Lisonia asked. She unknowingly pierced a tense bubble with the question. Nele, Vodari, and Ronata grimaced, and Nele hesitated to speak. Just as she opened her mouth, Vodari interjected.

“As it turns out,” he glanced at Nele, in a strange unspoken indication of his next words, “Nele never had her….First Rites…because she has been with Ronata all this time.”

Nele looked at Vodari and smiled warmly. “It’s alright, Vodari,” she said gently, “I don’t want there to be just one person in the group who doesn’t know _everything._ Darandar, Munavan and all them have known me at least six or seven years. _”_

As Ronata wove Nele’s hair back into a single chestnut braid, Nele recounted to Lisonia the same history she’d given the woman’s mate several moons before.

Luzacam’s eyes were wide and wild and he held his hands in front of him in a gesture of complete incomprehension. Munavan and Kenalal jogged towards him.

“So, what in the name of the Great Earth Mother just happened?” he looked around while he spoke.

“We killed a horse, apparently,” Munavan replied

“Why did they even want our help, then? I feel like we just ran around in circles all afternoon,” Luzacam asked, still bewildered.

“I do not know,” Kenalal said with punctuating pauses between each word. “I never knew trying to hunt with people who speak another language would be this hard.”

“Seriously, how do animals hunt in packs without talking?” Darandar said, as soon as he caught up to them, panting heavily.

“We should go, at least pretend to know how to help,” Munavan said, poking a thumb towards the horse carcass being worked on by a few Hadumai men.

The four men struggled to feel like anything but encumbrances when gutting and separating the horse. The Hadumai worked fast and spoke between themselves, giving quick indications of what to do next. Even with a knife in hand and gestures punctuating instructions, Munavan found himself quickly frustrated when working, getting mildly chastised when making a cut exactly where he _thought_ the men had indicated. It wasn’t long before the Zelandonii hunters were awkwardly waving their hands around above the carcass in an almost satirical facsimile of work. There was one thing, at least, that wasn’t affected by the language barrier: the four extra bodies were helpful for carrying the carcass back. They ultimately didn’t need to part it out, instead simply removing the internals and tying the body to posts to carry like a litter. The four Zelandonii, for once that day, felt completely useful.

Later on, the four men sat before the Haduma while some meat roasted on a spit. Kenalal was getting antsy. While the Hadumai had been a bit terse and quick to patronize them, they didn’t seem outwardly aggressive, and had never shouted at them or hoisted weapons to them since the initial encounter an entire day earlier. Nonetheless, the feeling of never being understood was very disorienting to him, and he really wanted to be back with his group, continuing on their way. He couldn’t help being uncomfortably anticipatory the longer he stayed with the tribe.

He let out an easy breath when bundles of meat, some raw and a couple cooked, were placed in front of each of the men. Their contribution to the hunt had actually been renumerated! Munavan had seemed quite confident it would be, but he didn’t want to let himself get too excited when he had no idea what was going on. “Hadu,” Kenalal said, patting the packed of meat, “Kalo,” he added when picking it up. He didn’t know if there was a point to offering his language’s term for ‘horse,’ but he did. If nothing else, the others would interpret it as words of thanks. He waited for his companions to make their own gestures. Their word for ‘thank you’ was unlike that of the Hadumai, but the meaning seemed understood.

He leaned his body in the first attempt of excusing himself from the fire, when Haduma started gesturing again.

“Oh, looks like we’re not finished here,” Munavan mentioned casually.

“Oh, great,” Luzacam said, with a weary tone to his voice that had been gradually augmenting over the past day.

They watched as Haduma made broad, esoteric gestures and pointed at her Doni figurine. She spoke the entire while, and Kenalal found himself noticing a few odd words he understood – their word for the Mother was _Duma,_ and their name for woman and man were _viviar_ and _viviaks,_ and with the gestures she made, he knew she could only be speaking of one thing: pleasures. The final dots connected in his mind as Haduma brought out two young women.

“Dalia, Velkuria,” said Haduma, patting each. Kenalal’s eyes were wide and his mouth came to a tight line. He turned to his friends and saw equally rabbit-like eyes on Darandar.

“Are they asking what I think they’re asking?” Darandar questioned.

There was a pause.

“Absolutely not. I would not be comfortable,” Kenalal said firmly.

Darandar shook his head, “First Rites with the Losadunai was not so bad, but if we can’t even get into a _horse’s_ guts with this language barrier, could we really…?”

“Oh, come on!” Luzacam rebuked, “For the first time since we got here, they’re offering us something pretty good, and now you’re going to take your leave?”

“These people are weird, Luzacam, I really don’t want to,” Darandar hissed. He tried to keep his face neutral, worried that the Hadumai would sense disgust in his expression. That was not his intent – the girls were plenty pretty, but he just couldn’t bring himself to take on a task like that right now.

“But it’s an honour!” Luzacam went on.

“Oh, yes, I’m sure you want to do it for the _honour,_ ” Darandar said. The neutrality he took on for the sake of the Hadumai came off as flippancy to Luzacam.

“That’s easy for you to say, I don’t have my way with another _woman’s_ mate.”

“Woah,” Kenalal interjected. “We can’t be getting agitated in front of them. They’re going to take offense. I say no. Darandar says no. Munavan?”

Munavan’s mouth was a tight line and he shook his head. “I don’t like doing First Rites in general, honestly. I prefer a woman with experience. I only did it once, and I don’t think I’ll ever do it again.”

“What if they’re mad at us?” Luzacam said.

“What are they going to do?” said Munavan, “Take our horse back and make us kill _another_ tomorrow? Let me handle it.”

He stood up and put out his hands. He spoke again clearly and with many gestures.

“Munavan and friends give thanks for the offer. It is an honour to the Mother. But we must leave.”

Kenalal cut in, putting a sparse few of his learned Hadumai words into the sentence. “We worry about leaving the women at camp tonight. We must leave.” 

Munavan gave him a tiny glance. That was definitely a lie, but it was a useful one. They had gleaned from the behavior of these people that they assigned certain particular roles to men and women, and it didn’t seem the Hadumai would want to keep the groups segregated for long. There were too many complimentary roles that couldn’t be filled by one gender alone.

While the girls looked a bit disappointed, especially tall, fair one eying Luzacam, Haduma did not seem at all deceived. She nodded, and allowed the men to collect their belongings. They walked some distance to the start of the embankment, guided by a silent Hadumai who would serve as their ferryman, and caught sight of the wisps of their friends’ campfire before it grew dark. They were weary, and glad to have dinner in their hands. Luzacam, though, made the whole trek with his head in a stormcloud.

Nele sorted through knobby mushrooms in her basket, and chopped them one by one into little discs.

“It’s true, you know,” she finally said to Vodari.

He looked up after tossing a few brambles onto the fire.

“That I never had my First Rites. I wasn’t a girl, then. And who would have known how to do it? I guess it doesn’t matter, since I won’t ever be able to have babies. I can get enough from Ronata.”

“You think? Even women who don’t take mates, or prefer women, or never have children at all get First Rites. It’s what makes you a woman.”

Nele’s warm, small smile disappeared in a flash. “It’s true, isn’t it? A girl isn’t a woman until she has First Rites. And I was really never a girl, either, was I?” He mushroom chopping became rather slow.

Vodari felt a churn in his chest. _Oops._ It was one of those occasions where he’d made a perfectly true statement, but said it in the most uncomfortable verbiage. He didn’t mean to make her feel worse, but the words had just cascaded out of his mouth.

“And only women can be magicians, too.”

“That’s just what the Hadumai believe, Nele. Most groups aren’t like that.”

“No, I don’t mean women like females, I mean only _adults_. Am I an adult, if I’ve never shared pleasures with the ‘opposite’ sex?” She tossed a few of the fungus into a separate basket, rather roughly.

“You can take care of yourself, and you found someone who loves you. That is just as much an adult as being able to share pleasures.”

Nele threw the last mushroom in the basket, and dropped her hands to her lap. “I think I’m going to look into it.”

Vodari’s heart suddenly felt very bubbly and uncomfortable at the very bottom of his esophagus. He choked out only, “Really?”

“Yes,”

There was a silence.

“It can’t be you, though,” Nele said. “You’re mated, and you’re an acolyte, the closest thing we’ve got to a Zelandoni. It wouldn’t be right.”

Vodari let out a tense breath. “Right.”

Nele sighed. “I might need to wait a long time. But, if I had to choose…”


	24. Chapter 24

Darandar laid on the tent’s ground cover, bare-chested but for his favorite tooth necklace. Ronata’s brown cascades, unbound for once, draped over his shoulder. It was rare they would be any more intimate than this on their travels – they had been, at times, but they tried to maintain a certain discretion, a nearly impossible task in such a tight-night traveling party. There was a pleasantness in running fingers through hair or down limbs, even if it ended there. Ronata reserved most of those comforting touches to Nele, but always saved a few for Darandar. He was the one who would put his foot down if she pushed further under peering eyes.

He’d been so silent for a moment that Ronata wondered if he’d fallen back to sleep. She traced a gentle hand on his smooth, soft chest and turned her head to watch his face. Watching his face was something she’d always loved, just to watch his responses to what others said. He’d get this warm look in his eyes and this tight, restrained smile when she or Luzacam or Kenalal would start teasing him, and she took it almost as a challenge to make the corners of this eyes crinkle up until a burst of laughter escaped his lips. Then he’d be doubled over, and if Ronata _really_ hit a comedic nerve, he’d make these airy, gasping sounds, high-pitched and uncontrollable. She realized even though she found her friend to be reasonably handsome and enjoyable company, there’d been some indiscernible moment where that laughter had become her _favorite_ thing about him. There was something infection about it that touched her heart in a way few other things did.

He wasn’t laughing, now. She watched his face. His thin, black eyebrows arched introspectively over his clear, grey eyes, leaving a crease between the ridges where the two brows met. He was lying with his face in a rigid, roof-pointed profile, his nose a straight line and his lips closed solidly.

“You know, Rand, you can’t just avoid the topic forever,” she watched his face still, and hesitated to be too certain, “If, I mean, that’s what you’re thinking about right now.”

“I’ll keep thinking on it. But I can’t. You know I can’t do that. You shouldn’t have told me.”

A strange little dream that had floated in Ronata’s imagination popped as quickly as a bubble in a stone-heated waterpot. “Well, better me than some other channel, right?”

He took a deep breath, chest rising under Ronata’s palm.

“Yeah.”

She planted a kiss on his cheek, “So get up. The sun is already high, and we’re leaving today.”

Kenalal stood atop the ridge overlooking the river they’d called home for seven days. He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and attempted certain calming, meditative postures. He spread the fingers of both hands while his arms were loose at his sides, and took the dry, steppe air through his nostrils and out his mouth. He could feel so many little aromas and flavours in the air that reminded him of the unexpected liveliness of the plains – the golden, herbal smell of grass was obviously the most dominant, but there were many undertones that could be caught on gusts of wind. Sometimes, a hot, honey smell of wildflowers would pass, sometimes with only the sweetness of nectar, and sometimes with the pungency of marjoram and ramson. The odors left by herding animals were dulled by their dilution in the air, leaving only a muddy and wild scent that was easier on the nose than the harsh and even putrid odors of a packed herd. The sense of smell, so integral to many of the animals on the plains who skittered about with their muzzles in a constant twitch, was often neglected in human beings, who found a certain reassuring precision in their reliance on sight and sound. Though he could, if need be, get a great deal of information from what his nose detected, Kenalal was using these breathing exercises for the simple purpose of tuning out the calamity that was occurring behind him.

“We want to stay away from those Hadumai weirdoes, so we should be staying to the south of the river, no matter what,” Munavan argued.  
“No, listen, this place is completely loaded with tributaries. We need to cross while the going’s good, because we don’t have a boat.” Luzacam countered.

“Well, it’s still spring. If we end up needing to cross rivers a bit later in the season, is it really that bad? It will be so hot out, we’ll be happy to cross them,” Vodari offered.

“It won’t be great if the water is ten times a person’s height and filled with bison-sized sturgeon, though,” Ronata said.

“People, we can still see our campsite and we are already arguing about it,” Darandar sighed with a hint of humour in his voice.

“Ultimately, we’re following the river,” Ronata said, “If we can see the river, everything else is secondary.”

“Yeah, but what happens when we get to another swampy place and get our feet soggy again?” Nele said, “Do you think it could be possible to go far enough south of the water that we can take a more direct route across the plains?”

“No, no,” Luzacam shook his head, “If we want to get far away from the water, we will need to be on the north side. The south side will lead us so far south that we will be off-course.”

“But if we’re on the North, we’re in Hadumai lands, and I’ve had enough of that!” Munavan said, frustration quickly edging into his voice.

“Wait, wait, wait. Everyone, have we even taken stock of the fact we’re still on the southward stretch of the Great Mother? There isn’t really a south or north side anymore. There’s an east and a west,” Ronata interrupted.

“Oh great,” Darandar exclaimed, “So now we need to have this entire argument again but saying ‘east’ and ‘west’ instead of ‘north’ and ‘south’?”

“We just need to keep walking _east_ ,” Lisonia tried to reason. “We came from the west. We go east, and judge it day by day.”

“That solves nothing, though, because what happens when we reach a tributary? I heard the southbound rivers are way more aggressive than the ones that cross east-west, because they’re fueled by so much glacial runoff,” Luzacam rubbed his beard; the edges in his voice beginning to match Munavan’s

“Well it’s like the old saying goes, ‘we cross those rivers when we get to them’.” Vodari said sagely.

“Then why is this argument even happening!?” Luzacam said, starting to gesture his arms erratically.

Kenalal approached the group in a stately fashion and began to speak in a voice both calm but slightly pinched with distress: “This is what I think we should do. We should stay to the western bank of the Mother and avoid the Hadumai for now. When we are a few days south, we should determine if the river has started to veer east again. If we start seeing southern mountains or southern seas while walking south, I think we’ll have gone too far. I don’t want to get stuck down there; I think that much like to the north, there are huge ice sheets to the south, and we have no idea if there’s any way around at all. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to spend the entire rest of my life trying to find my way through a glacier. When we are far enough south to see any ice in the distance, I think we turn, _no matter what._ The Great Mother River _will_ guide us, but we don’t want to be so dogmatic about it following it that we put ourselves in danger.”

Everyone who had been listening nodded gently. Kenalal seemed to mitigate many of their problems in a single statement. “That’s just my opinion,” he added a bit lamely, “I know this group can barely decide where to stop for dinner, so I don’t expect us to have this planning thing down perfectly even after all this time.”

Kenalal strode back to the highest point of the ridge. His seven friends trailed closely behind, each taking in the view. The Great Mother River carved a deep, undulating trench across the landscape, at places taking on an appearance of a sparsely-wooded valley. It was reassuring to think perhaps a similar temporary dwelling to the one in which they’d recently partaken could be found later on. The rest of the land, as far as the eye could see, was covered in a heaving ocean of green and yellow grasses, blowing and pulsating in the wind like waves on the sea. At the edges of the visible horizon, blurred in the haze of dust and sunlight, there were the occasional indistinct herds, and beneath the waves of the long grasses, an entire ecosystem thrived – chittering birds, scuttling bugs and rodents, and hundreds of little movements that the humans could detect and never follow. The travelers drank in these images with one thought as a shared undercurrent: they had a great deal of walking ahead of them.

Munavan found himself trapped in a day-to-day routine that Darandar had explained as “grass, grass, and more grass.” He had always assigned value to his capacities in leadership, but in the current moment, this headstrong role in the group had left him with exactly one benefit: he was first in line to eke a path through the tall, scraping grass. Munavan had to wonder, too, if his friends assigned him this role not because he had impressive inherent leadership charisma, or because he was so broad that he would carve the widest path in the grass. He visualized Nele or Kenalal walking through the grass and making a reed-thin passage that the rest of them could only cross by crab-walking sideways. He let a puff of air escape his nostril at the imagery, and followed with multiple other puffs of air as a fly buzzed near his face. Great, he thought, we’re getting into _fly season._ It seemed every winter, people would long for summer, for green and vegetables and fat, healthy animals, but it was a sort of self-preservation to forget, every year, that flies exist. In the dryness of the plains, mosquitoes and other swamp-breeding bugs were rare, but if they approached closely to a herd or the mucky leavings of where a herd once stood, they would quickly encounter swarms of buzzing, gnawing, _annoying_ creatures.

The first few days of walking had come with renewed excitement, just like they always did at the start of a new leg. The moon had gone from just the slightly sliver away from blackness, all the way to near-fullness since they’d left their riverside sanctuary, and the conversation had dimmed, as if they’d nearly run out of things to talk about. Now, the group had settled into a single-file queue, trudging through a lake of sedges and white-green bustles of Artemisia. Munavan would sometimes prod at Kenalal or Darandar, seeing if he could make them mad by playing dumb, but even that got old. There were only so many ways to imply that Darandar was well-endowed or that Kenalal worked too hard without them simply rolling their eyes and tuning him out.

Munavan instead hummed to himself, rattling out a very subtle rhythm underfoot as he walked. Sometimes he’d imagine rhyming lyrics in his mind, and he wished he had a way to keep track of all the words he concocted. Luzacam shared his musical passion, and would sometimes distract him from his reverie by humming out his own rhythms. They took little interest in each other’s mental projects, though now and again they’d share their ideas at the evening fire. Munavan also quickly learned to keep far away from Darandar, who had a nervous habit of rattling out energetic, high-paced tapping rhythms on belt or parfleche or any firm and resosant object on his body, with no musical intent behind it. The sound wouldn’t quite be annoying if it wasn’t for the fact that Munavan had his own lines of melody running through his mind.

One day, at last, Ronata spoke up while Munavan was tapping the blunt end of a spear a little more loudly than usual.

“Give me something to sing,” she said.

“No thanks. You can’t sing,” he replied, exaggerated harshness in his tone.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I think you’ll find I’m the best singer of the group,” she furrowed her brow in uncharacteristic defensiveness.

Munavan grinned. “Sing a love song for Darandar.”

“No!”

“How about one for Nele?”

“No.”

“Wow, that is very mean,” Luzacam shouted back.

Ronata decided she’d just sing something from the recesses of her memory. Her voice was strangely high-pitched and powerfully resonant. It sounded entirely different from her flat and gravelly speaking voice. Vodari couldn’t help but smile at how many Losadunai words slipped into the song.

“Well, we knew we’d deal with this eventually,” Lisonia said, hands on her hips.

The group had walked nearly a whole moon cycle, and they were finally at a point where they had little choice but to cross a wide and powerful waterway. There had been times in the past month where little streams had cut across their paths, and they’d kept their footwear off, holding packs high overhead, to stomp through the chilly spring water to the other side. At the best of times, the streams were dotted with current-smoothened stones that they could leapfrog across, keeping feet and clothing dry as long as no one made a misstep. Nele and Munavan were the most common culprits for such mistakes in footing, and eventually, it wasn’t even funny to mock them anymore. This section of water was not one they could walk across, or even swim across. It was churning in shades of deep blues, topped by aggressive cyan foam, whirling in coarse eddies across the length of it. It would not be safe to cross without some kind of transportation.

“Okay so, will we make a raft, or keep walking until we find a narrower way…?” Darandar asked.

“We might just need to backtrack. It looked a lot easier the day before yesterday,” Luzacam said.

“No way. We aren’t backtracking that far,” Munavan protested. “We can make a raft.”

“Problem,” Kenalal announced, “Where will we find trees for rafts? This place is still pretty low on trees.”

Munavan pinched the bridge of his nose and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. With his free hand, he splayed out his fingers in gesticulation while talking. “Let’s walk the rest of the day down the shore, and see what we can scrounge up.”

They hadn’t been walking for very long when Luzacam made an announcement. “Uh, check it out everyone.” He kicked a post with a thick, woven rope attached to it. “This isn’t natural.”

“Someone else hitched a raft here,” Kenalal said when catching sight of the post. “But the raft itself isn’t there.” He scanned downriver for a sign of a similar hitching post, and saw some unnaturally sharp shapes nestled among dwarf trees on the other side. “Oh. Convenient.”

“Too bad we don’t have a raft, to get that raft,” Darandar said.

“Maybe we should stop here for the rest of the day. We might be able to signal the owners of that raft,” said Vodari.

Nele, Lisonia, and Kenalal got to work building and igniting a fire. Vodari, Munavan, and Kenalal then took efforts to block and unblock the smoke in regular patterns that, if seen by other humans, would likely be interpreted as beacons, and surely not interpreted as a natural phenomenon. The rest of the group were hypnotized by watching little grey clouds float above their campsite in puffs, cease momentarily, dissipate, and be replaced by the next puff. The three men grew weary in the arms, and other members of the party took over in alternation while the rest undertook the same mending, knapping, carving, or food preparation activities they always did when they hit a long rest.

The afternoon was waning when Vodari caught sight of people coming down the slope on the other end of the watercourse. The party was made entirely of men, and they were all wearing grass skirts.

“Not these guys again,” Luzacam said in disbelief.


	25. Chapter 25

“There’s no way,” Kenalal stated, in a flat voice slightly tinted by confusion.

Ronata sighed deeply dug her fingers into the hair at her crown. “Lisonia. Hadumai. Let’s remember what we know.”

In a gesture brewing thought, Lisonia wriggled her fingers and rotated her hands at the wrists. The other woman strode to the back of the pack to join her in a huddle. They murmured to each other: “Man, woman, oh, horse.”

“Hunt. Uh… thank you?”

“What do they say for greeting? Oh, yeah.”

“Don’t forget, their word for the Mother is Duma.”

Kenalal shot a few of his own words over his shoulder as he watched the grass-skirt strangers migrate to the shore, unhook their raft, and begin to make their way purposefully across the river. As the vessel approached, he recognized that there was a certain craftsmanship to it that put it beyond the level of a simple raft; it had curvature and structure to it. It had bowed edges that kept water out, and the wood of the exterior hull was trimmed rather finely. There were also some subtle hints at decoration; while the vessel wasn’t elaborate, there were some deliberate carving and staining along the visible parts of the wood. There was a brief window in his cloud of anxiety, inside which he pondered how useful it would be to carry a boat with them everywhere they went. He couldn’t quite wrap his mind around how much traveling on the water instead of beside it would hasten, or at least simplify, the pace of travel, but he knew it would have been a meaningful difference. 

He gripped his spear loosely but consciously as the men shimmied the craft to shore. One hopped off, tied the raft to the peg on their end of the shore, and waited for the other three before approaching. Kenalal started to step forward, but saw that Munavan had beat him to it.

Munavan started the introductions to the group, trying to appear confident yet non-threatening. His ever-booming voice caused the strangers to exchange brief glances with each other as he began. After pointing at himself and saying his name and group, Munavan gestured at the group of men. “Men of the Hadumai?” he asked, tilting his voice up exaggeratedly at the end, hoping it would indicate a question.

The men smiled and shook their heads.

“Kendodumai,” said the lead man. “To _Horan.”_

“Tohoran?” repeated Munavan.

“Horan,” the man corrected.

“Zelandonii need. Water,” Munavan said, gesturing back and forth with arms in alternation. The men looked somewhat perplexed as they quietly chattered amongst themselves.

Lisonia noticed that their spoken language did sound a lot like Hadumai, but she wasn’t sure if they were similar enough to be mutually intelligible, if they were more cousin-languages like Zelandonii and Losadunai, or if her unaccustomed ears just thought of them both as ‘foreign’.

One of the men concluded by offering Munavan his full waterbag. Munavan looked at it and made a grunt. That wasn’t what he meant by water.

Lisonia stepped forward and tried again: “Zelandonii –“ she gestured at her friends, and included her and Vodari in the group for simplicity – “Travel far. Water, need…” she moved her arm up and down, and traced a finger from near her body to the other shore of the river. The men nodded at each other and one made a ‘come along’ gesture with his arm. The group followed, and stepped onto the watercraft. They were impressed and pleased that all twelve people could fit on the raft at once, though it was sitting very low in the water and would surely yield if a copy of Munavan were to come onboard. The Kendodumai men started paddling with long, whittled pieces of antler, narrowed at the handle with the palmate ends left intact to create an oar-like shape.

Munavan examined the boat under him as well as he could in the limited time it took to cross. It was too bad he didn’t know Kendodumai; he’d ask them questions about how they built it, or even what it was called. He asked a question that expressed as much – in a mix of his own language and the handful of Hadumai words he’d learned. These people probably didn’t actually speak Hadumai, either - maybe something vaguely similar or maybe not.

“Upe’ub duma,” said one of the men.

“Ooh pay. Oobdoom,” Munavan repeated. The four men began to laugh heartily.

“I think that’s the name of the river, not the boat,” Lisonia mentioned.

“Or maybe they’re laughing because he’s pronouncing it like he grew up with a pack of hyenas,” Ronata snorted.

The travelers made it to the other side without much trouble, and made gestures of thanks to their guides. Kenalal offered them a few flint blades, always content to dispose of his over-abundance, some of which were beginning to chip and deteriorate from all the time spent in his pack. Nele offered them one of her more marginal woven sashes, too. They seemed impressed, unaware that she’d retained her best work for the more long-term hosts they’d eventually encounter.

Past the northern bank of the river, the group was met with more of the same flat, grassy lands they’d trekked through for the past nearly two moons. As they turned their heads east, however, amidst a grey-violet horizon haze, they could see the faintest beginning outlines of those mountains the Mamutoi called Kartuskirpa.

As much as the glacial period was associated with cold and snow, summers on the open grasslands were brutal. For the three months that separated the Longday’s moon and the autumn Even-Day, the plains would be baked in relentless sun, masked more often by overbearing beige dust-storms than by the moist shade of puffy white clouds. The party found themselves very pleased to realize they’d probably be again within the shadow of the mountains before the peak of summer set in. By that time, the greenery of the grassland would be sun-bleached to shades of gold and dun.

The bugs that had been irritating the traveling party before would come back in droves – not only would the flies that crowded grazing herds find a tasty meal among the humans, but one would also encounter droves of hopping grasshoppers, some large enough to make a meal, and very true to their name with powerful hind legs allowing them to leap from the ground right into the hands of a person at their standing height. The slew of insects laid low among grasses, ambushing travelers with hopping and flying with nearly no rhyme or reason – few took human blood as food. Those who did, however, left irritating welts that were irresistibly itchy. For all that sweating, dehydration, and sunburn were all very real risks, most people counted bug bites as the paramount nuisance of summer travel.

“Cute flowers,” Nele said, pointing out clusters of small, yellow puffs amidst a green, grassy mound. “Marigolds,” Lisonia noted. It was the Losaduna word, and from the lexicon of the others in the group, they understood the word as _happy sun flower._ The word smacked of charm and cuteness.

“Hey, wait. We should pick these,” Ronata said.

“You’re right,” Vodari said, “The marigold is a decent insect repellant. Though, garlic is better, it also smells really strongly, so I would rather keep it for the really severe situations.”

“I could sure use that right about now,” Kenalal said.

With no fully-trained healer in the group, the party experimented with different applications of the flower later that evening, when the bundles they’d plucked were safely deposited at the nightly camp. On their skin, they smeared fresh, crushed petals and the liquid from the stems, and they made decoctions with the smashed remains. Some of the smaller buds and new stalks that hadn’t grown to full size were blanched and added to their nightly dinner, though the fully-grown flowers were not good to eat. By the next morning, they felt as though the entire party was wafting off a yellow-hued cloud of marigold essence. That ought to keep the bugs away for now.

Six more days of consistent walking brought the group through an ascendant collection of lowlands and foothills, as they felt the particular glacial nip of nearby peaks slowly incorporate itself into their environment. There was an undercurrent of nostalgic comfort to finally return to areas with more consistent forestry – it reminded them of the lands they’d left behind nearly a year ago. The bushes of the plains became somewhat more tightly packed, as well as sturdier and more massive. Soon, this gave way to greater collections of trees – _real ­_ trees.

In this marginal sloped region between the plains and the mountain foothills, there was an incredible diversity of useful plants, some of which had been absent for a while. In the growing early-summer warmth, there was much to collect. Walnut trees and hazelnut trees lined tributaries. Most of their nuts were still acidic and green, lacking the rich and oily quality they achieved with full ripeness, but were valued collectibles nonetheless. The green, young walnuts could be cut thin and pickled, and the husks of the shells made a strong, versatile dye. They collected some of these husks for future use, careful to store them in separate pouches away from skin, sweat, and anything that they didn’t want to stain. Lisonia was particularly excited over these – she’d done very little sewing on the journey beyond mending that which needed it, and she considered that dyed leathers could make a good starting point for thank-you gifts for future helpers. She’d felt awkward that Nele and Kenalal had offered thank-you gifts to the ferrymen when she’d had nothing. The thought made her consider that Nele may also want some nuts to stain her cordage, and she suggested this to her.

Darandar was also quite pleased to find yew trees, long-absent on the plains, whose flexible wood was indispensable for making wooden tools due to its elasticity and workability. He approached the tree to collect himself some trimmings, thinking perhaps he’d offer some to Luzacam for carving, when he noticed bunches of white-edged, shiny green leaves at its base. Delicate white flowers were just beginning to sprout.

“This is pretty,” he noted.

“It’s holly,” Ronata said as she approached.

Vodari and Lisonia had been prattling in their Losadunai-leaning hybridized language as they discovered many medicinal plants that they hadn’t seen in moons. They noticed the statement from their companions at the tree.

“Grab some of that, too,” Vodari said, “If you’re careful with it, it can make a very energizing tea. But if you’re not, well, you’ll pee. A lot.”

Darandar was caught off-guard by the statement and let our pearls of laughter as he plucked a few leaves to hand to Vodari. The two Losadunai were loading up on linden, too, and soon realized they’d be taking a cumbersome collection of things if they didn’t restrain themselves.

“This place is absolutely blessed,” Darandar said. “Look. We went on a spree. This is a lot better than the onions and garlic we had constantly out on the plains.”

“This place _is_ blessed,” Kenalal said, rounding a butte to join his group. “There’s no way there aren’t people around here somewhere. This much abundance isn’t going to go unseen this close to the Great Mother River.”

The travelers journeyed on, twirling fragrant purple thyme flowers in their hands to enjoy the bright and savory smell. Darandar had the idea of using it as a supplement to his mint tooth-care and breath-freshener, which he regretted promptly. Beyond the verdant scent of fresh thyme, though, they detected a faint but unmistakable smell: wood smoke.

The Zelandonii voyagers followed a rounded, grassy hill dotted with yellow flowers to its crest. Their breaths caught in their throats when the full panorama from the peak revealed itself. It had been a while since they had seen the river from such a high vantage point, and it was only now, looking backwards, that they could appreciate the altitude they’d gained over the past day. Below them, the river flowed wide and rugged, cutting a deep, silvery channel between their shelf and another matching, sheer wall on the other side. They couldn’t see much across the sinewy path before them, but if their northern wall was similarly matching to the southern one facing them, they would be continuing on the edge of a very high, rocky ridge for quite some time. There was a gentle excitement in the group, knowing the next segment of their path would offer far greater visual entertainment than the monotony of the grasslands had offered.

The winds on the ridge toyed with the travelers in diverse gusts; the sun beat down hard in very late days of spring, yet the glacial mountain winds hurried down from the Carpathians, and the fresh, hearty air near the surface of the river brought with it fragrances of a rich diversity of trees. Upon the ridge, broad-leafed hardwood trees at last held their own against their needled cousins that had dominated all tiny glens of the steppes. While the tops of the ridges were bald from those glacier winds, lower ledges displayed proud and powerful oaks, the likes of which had been unseen to the travelers for many moons. The leaves heaved in synch from the gentle mountain breeze, with the occasional burst of irregular movement from the squirrels, jays, and woodpeckers who dwelt within.

The journeyers carved out a path very close to the edge of the cliff, which left a few of them with a tense feeling that roped from the throat to the stomach in a tight, knotted coil. Munavan found himself stilling an intrusive thought of how easy it would be to simply dive into the Mother from so high, and how likely it would be to kill you. Others, however, took this anxious coil as a positive source of excitement, and took the occasional break to stand at the edge of the cliff, right before it became loose with loess, and took a deep, appreciative breath, as if to take a mental picture of the scene.

When they approached another steep, ascendant section of the mountain, they spied herds of bounding mountain goats hopping perniciously down jagged, rocky hills. The creatures, called chamois, were rounded, stocky little beasts whose round, doe eyes and soft-featured faces made them resemble a deer as much as a goat, but were in fact closer related to antelope than either of these animals. Their pale faces were crossed from forehead to chin with twin stripes of what looked like war-paint; their two horns were relatively short and straight with a back-angled curve. Their scant size and general plumpness gave the chamois a sort of eternal youth.

“Imagine being able to walk straight down a cliff with little hooves like that,” Nele mused

“I can barely get down a cliff on my normal feet,” Darandar responded.

When the group got a bit closer to a cluster of relaxing chamois, the goats leapt to their feet and bounded away in haste.

“We scared them off,” Kenalal said, “If they get spooked by humans just walking near them, it might mean this area gets hunted.”

“Didn’t you notice the smoke on the wind?” Ronata asked, “We have to be near people. There’s no doubt.”

“But imagine how awful it would be to live on the edge of this cliff in winter. Your shelter would topple over every single night,” Lisonia noted.

“Maybe they have caves in the walls. I mean, look at how high these walls are,” Darandar said. “If it’s anything like home, the place has got to be littered with caves.”

“Maybe less of them than you think,” Kenalal said as he dragged a hand on an outcropping, “This isn’t the same kind of stone as back home, it doesn’t wear away the same. Obviously there’s going to be caves, but I would guess many of them are on the water level.”

“Oh look at me, I know stones,” Munavan teased.

“I _do_ know stones,” Kenalal chided. He had grown to appreciate Munavan’s teasing as being generally unbacked by ill-intentions, but every so often he would be nicked by fear that Munavan really didn’t respect him.

“Okay, Stone Expert, what kind of rock formation is _this?”_ Darandar called out, scooting to the edge of the cliff to the south of Kenalal. Sitting atop a boulder on the cliff’s edge was a very deliberate stack of flat stones that could not have been made by accident. It was a marker. Munavan approached it hestitantly. He looked beyond the cliff. In the distance, there was a distinct grey snake of rising smoke.


End file.
